MEN FROM BOYS

For one thing, the choice would be too vast, the book too large. But then, unbidden, the title leapt to mind: Men from Boys. And once it was there, lodged in my brain, it wouldn’t leave. It was – it is – a kind of statement, a declaration, but also, and crucially, it provided a focus and a theme.

It also had the effect of cutting the number of writers I might have approached by half. No McDermid, no Fyfield, no Stella Duffy; no Grafton, no Paretsky, no Julie Smith. No Alice Sebold. No Suzanne Berne.

Just men.

Men writing, for the most part, about what it is to be a man.

To succeed; to fail. To open one’s eyes.

As the protagonist in Don Winslow’s ‘Douggie Doughnuts’ comes to realise, there are things you do and things you don’t do. Again and again – but never two ways the same – the people who inhabit these stories are having to determine what is right, what will give them dignity, what will earn them self-respect.

Some – the young men in Mark Billingham’s ‘Dancing Towards the Blade’ or Michael Connelly’s ‘After Midnight’, for instance – make their choices with their fathers’ voices ringing in their ears; others have to contend with parents who are venal at best, incorrigibly corrupt at worst.

Little is perfect. In Daniel Woodrell’s beautifully understated ‘Two Things’, the best a father can say of his relationship with his son is that it was ‘something terrible I have lived through’. Andrew Coburn’s marvellous novella takes us through three generations of an extended family whose members variously fall to sudden acts of violence or simple self-regarding avarice, and where the strength of purpose and single-mindedness of the father is passed on not to the son but to the daughter.

But if all had accepted that would have simply meant a bigger book. There is no one here whose name I am not pleased and proud to include; no piece of work that has not earned its place.

That’s why we keep doing it, of course. Trying to. One reason, anyway. Testing ourselves, testing the skill. It certainly isn’t, unless we’re lucky enough to turn heads at The New Yorker, for the money.

‘There’s a joy’, says Donald Westlake (and, yes, he’d be in here if I had my way), ‘in watching economy of gesture when performed by a real pro, whatever the art.’ He compares writing short stories with playing jazz: ‘a sense of vibrant imagination at work within a tightly controlled setting’. He says it’s what turns writers on. Readers too.

There’s a real pleasure for me in the way the writers of these stories create worlds that are instantly recognisable and believable yet as widely apart as a deprived London housing estate and the trenches of the First World War, the claustrophobia of a late-night back-room poker game or a rundown jazz joint in Manhattan and the slow but irrevocable decay of the small New England town on which Don Winslow riffs so passionately. I’m in awe, too, of the way James Sallis leads us through a landscape delineated with absolute clarity, except that by kicking away the narrative props that we’re used to, the scene takes on a bewildering half-amnesiac state which mirrors what is going on in the central character’s mind.

The prospect of Bill James’s lustful yet lethal Assistant Chief Constable Isles let loose in a posh private girls’ school and of Brian Thompson’s semi-retired geezers girding up their loins to take on the Russian mafia both fill me with delight, and I give myself up joyously to the promise of Dennis Lehane’s ‘Until Gwen’, whose first sentence hurtles us along with dangerous expectation. ‘Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an eight-ball in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.’

And . . .

But enough from me. Enjoy. Read on.

He left behind a frayed wife, two adolescent sons and many debts. Jack, the elder son, had his father’s dark hair, deep-set eyes and carefree ways. Edward, a year younger, blond and fair, with little definition to his face, resembled no one in particular. Jack had been his father’s favorite. Edward seemed always in his mother’s protective custody.

Distraught, drawing her sons to her, Milly West said, ‘Who will take care of us?’

‘I will,’ Jack said.

Edward said, ‘I’ll help.’

They worked after-school jobs and their mother languished with the knowledge she would not last long. Jack came home late each evening from clearing tables at Lomazzo’s Restaurant, where the waitresses were youngish and married. With a peculiar hush about her, Milly West washed lipstick from his collars.

In private to Edward, she whispered, ‘You’re the younger, but it’s Jack I worry about. You’re the level-headed one. Are you listening, dear?’

Edward nodded, proud of the rating.

Later that evening, still carrying that peculiar hush, she spoke to Jack. ‘You mustn’t think of your father as any kind of hero. When he wasn’t welshing on bets, he was chasing women, breaking up marriages. Others paid for his shenanigans.’

‘Who killed him, Mom?’

‘Could’ve been anybody.’

‘But we should know.’

‘It won’t bring him back.’

Weather permitting, Milly West spent an hour each afternoon talking to her husband’s headstone. On the last afternoon, braving a stiff breeze, she said, ‘I’m not well, Hank. The boys don’t know. Edward suspects but doesn’t say anything. He’s afraid of the truth, and Jack is too much wrapped up in himself to see. He’s so much like you, Hank. That’s not meant as a criticism. It’s just the way you were and he is.’

She glanced away. Visitors to another grave were tidying up the site and lovingly positioning fresh flowers. She guessed they were father and daughter. When she returned her attention to the headstone, she was smiling. ‘Here you are, Hank, lying cold-stone dead in the ground, but in the phone book you’re quite alive and you still get mail. You never believed it, but see, there is life after death.’

The next day her breathing was bad. Feeling an unusual heaviness around her heart, she lay down on the couch, which was where Edward found her.

‘What’s the matter, Mom?’

She looked up at him with a smile so final Edward wanted to cry. She tried to raise her head but couldn’t. No longer able to pump air, she gasped. No longer able to think, she drifted. No longer conscious, she died.

At evening’s end Edward leaned over the casket to give his mother a last look. Touching her chill hand told him the exact temperature of a grave. Jack, who played the piano by ear, could not take his eyes off his mother’s face, the stillness of which suggested a sustained note of music pitched too high for human hearing, though a hound howling wouldn’t have surprised him.

Later in the month Jack, a nonchalant student, graduated from Haverhill High. Edward, a fastidious one, had a year to go. They had no aunts or uncles and no grandparents. Their father had been an orphan and their maternal grandparents were long deceased.

With a hint of panic in his voice, Edward said, ‘We’re on our own.’

‘Sooner or later,’ Jack said, ‘everybody’s on his own. We’re just starting sooner.’

‘I don’t want to quit school.’

‘You don’t have to.’

Jack worked two jobs, at Lomazzo’s and at the Elite Bowling Alley, where he was the evening manager and a favorite among women bowlers, one of whom he had an affair with until her husband threatened him with bodily harm. Jack left Haverhill when Edward received a diploma, along with a scholarship to Bentley School of Accounting.

The brothers shook hands at the train station. Edward said, ‘What if you get killed?’

‘I won’t,’ Jack said and, smiling, boarded the train. ‘Take care, kid.’

Jack spent three years in the army. Truman, then Eisenhower, was in the White House, and American troops were in Korea. Jack, however, spent the bulk of his service in Germany, where his buddies were college-educated draftees who included him in their bull sessions. With them, he sharpened his sense of the ridiculous and agreed that in a very large way soldiering was silly.

To Edward he wrote, ‘No army camp is home, no bunk a bed, and my APO number is not an address. It’s merely where I’m reachable. My uniform is not a suit of clothes. It’s a body badge. It gives me certain privileges, some protection, but no rights.’

To a waitress at Lomazzo’s: ‘I still can’t get used to saluting an officer. It’s pretending the guy’s a god when the odds are he’s a horse’s ass.’

Again to Edward: ‘In the Bahnhof district every woman is available. The young ones are sweet and hard-working. The older ones have spooky eyes and look at you out of layers of makeup. They’re the ones who’ve lost husbands, children, whole families in the war, which to us is just a historical event. They see us as brats worth no more than the military money in our pockets.’

Assigned to a supply depot and given responsibilities and a civilian assistant named Gretchen, Jack began dealing on the black market. Contraband included field jackets and overcoats, field phones and stopwatches, C rations and flashlights, tent stoves and electric pumps, wool blankets and sheets. Gretchen was his accomplice and, on his overnight passes, his bedmate.

To Edward: ‘She’s smart, university-educated, and she speaks five languages and better English than I do. She adored her father, who was captain of a U-boat that lies somewhere at the bottom of the North Sea. Her mother hasn’t been right since and Gretchen is sole support. I think I’m in love, kid.’

Edward wrote back that he had finished up early at Bentley and was working in the accounting department of the Haverhill National Bank. He did not mention that he was courting a co-worker named Marion, who some days seemed interested in him and other days not.

Marion was a year younger but seemed older. Her aloof bearing and the depth of her voice impressed people, Edward most of all. At times her reserve was impenetrable. Over spaghetti at Lomazzo’s, a basket of bread and rolls separating them, he proposed. Moments passed.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Yes.’ She sprinkled grated cheese over her plate.

‘Well?’

‘My mother says to marry big or not at all.’

‘I plan to make money,’ he said with a sudden sense of himself. ‘A lot of money.’

She twirled spaghetti around her fork, no loose ends. ‘I’m a strong woman, Edward. Can you deal with that?’

‘My mother was strong.’

‘Really.’ She tore bread and buttered a piece. ‘Your brother used to work here, didn’t he?’

‘Yes. Did you know him?’

‘Heard about him. Are you anything like him?’

‘No.’

‘Are you a virgin, Edward?’

He blushed.

‘I thought so. I am too, more or less.’

He looked at her square in the face. ‘Marion, what are your feelings for me?’

‘I’m intrigued. You’re the only person I know whose father was murdered.’

‘That’s it? That’s all?’

‘There must be more. Has to be. Otherwise I’m sure I wouldn’t be here.’

‘Then will you marry me?’

‘I’ll give it thought, Edward.’

They finished their dinner, their dessert, their coffee. When the check arrived, Edward produced a wallet branded with his initials, a birthday gift all the way from Germany. He scrutinised the check and paid it. The tip was a pittance. The waitress gazed down at them.

Marion rose stiffly and walked ahead of him. On the street she spun round. ‘Don’t ever embarrass me again.’

‘What are they talking about?’ Jack asked with a grin.

She was slow to rise. Her eyes, which had filled, looked newly blue. ‘What it would be like to live and breathe again.’

He guessed the image in her mind. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, taking her hand.

‘You lost yours too.’

‘Your father was a hero. Mine wasn’t.’

Hand in hand, they sauntered back to the hotel. In the small lobby, standing with a cane that twitched under his weight, an old man smiled at them and said something in French.

‘What did he say?’ Jack asked.

‘Ah, to be our age again.’

In their warm room they made love twice, the second time with almost painful tenderness. Then they lay apart but wedded as if by an invisible ampersand. Jack whispered, ‘Have you decided?’

‘I can’t leave my mother, you know that. But it’s good you’re going home. You take too many chances here.’

‘You’ll be all right? Financially?’

‘More than all right.’

‘I’ll come back. I’ll live here, Gretchen. We’ll get married.’

‘Every soldier says that.’

‘But I mean it.’

Nudity made her a pale ghost. ‘I love you, Jack.’

Sergeant stripes on his sleeves, Jack boarded the USS General Blatchford, which sailed out of Bremerhaven and docked eleven days later at Staten Island. Mustered out at Camp Kilmer, he flew from Idlewild to Logan, where he pumped hands with his waiting brother.

‘You’ve gained weight, kid.’

‘You haven’t,’ Edward said.

‘We got different bones.’

‘You got the better ones. Dad’s.’

On the drive to Haverhill Jack said, ‘What kind of car is this?’

‘Pre-war Buick. A-one condition.’

‘Radio work?’ Jack reached over and turned it on. The singer was Dean Martin, the song ‘That’s Amore’.

‘I’m doing good at the bank, Jack.’

‘Knew you would. Good experience for when you come to work for me.’

‘Yuh? What kind of work you talking about?’

‘Haven’t figured it out yet, but I got money. You banked it for me, didn’t you?’

Edward handed over a passbook. ‘Every cent.’

Jack checked the balance. ‘I’m in business, kid. Only time will tell how big.’

Edward drove past Woolworths in downtown Haverhill and cruised up the hill past the Paramount Theater, the courthouse, the high school, with Jack gazing out at each.

‘Good to be back. I missed you, kid.’

‘You seemed to have had a good time over there.’

‘I did.’

‘What about that girl you told me about?’

‘Gretchen? She’s all woman. She’ll keep.’

Edward drove past churches at Monument Square, hooked a left, then a right, and soon pulled up at the tenement house where, ground level, they had lived since boyhood. A light was on in the front window and someone was looking out.

‘Who’s that?’

‘I’ve been waiting to tell you,’ Edward said.

‘So tell me.’

‘I’m married.’

Jack laughed. ‘Now tell me you’re kidding.’

‘Her name’s Marion.’

Jack frowned. ‘You do something like that not even asking me first? I can’t believe it.’

Edward was silent.

Jack’s frown vanished as if never there and his laugh was loud. ‘Congratulations!’

Jack moved back into his old room, which was as he had left it, although Marion may have tidied it a little. The newlyweds had appropriated the marriage bed of Hank and Milly West. Edward, his bedroom converted into an office, supplemented his salary preparing tax returns.

From the start Jack aggravated Marion. When introduced, he had kissed her square on the mouth, a presumption she felt robbed her of rank. He exasperated her when he left his clothes around, and he infuriated her when he knocked on the bathroom door and asked how long she’d be.

In bed with Edward, she said, ‘I don’t like it when he walks around in his skivvies. That’s disrespectful to me.’

‘I’ll speak to him.’

‘You might as well know, I don’t like the way he looks at me. That’s disrespectful to you.’

‘That’s just Jack. He’d never do anything.’

‘Don’t be so sure. Another thing, I hate it when he calls you “kid”. It belittles you.’

‘He’s being affectionate.’

‘I’d call it condescending.’

The following evening she said to Jack, ‘I’m sick of taking phone calls from women. I’m not your messenger.’

Jack, his dark hair slicked back, was dressed to go out. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said with a grin. ‘Jealous?’

She stiffened and glared. ‘You think you’re God’s gift, don’t you?’

‘No, but I’m one hell of a guy. Obviously you’ve noticed.’

A deep whisper. ‘You prick.’

‘Ah, there’s the real Marion,’ he said. ‘Has Edward met her yet?’

A few days later Edward said to Jack, ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Don’t say another word. I’m moving out tomorrow.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I already have another place. Not to worry, kid. I still love you.’

He moved to Haverhill’s Bradford section, into a furnished flat on the first floor of the Bradford Manor. A nice neighborhood. A great address for his business card, his business unspecified, for he was still looking for one.

Evenings, when he wasn’t with a woman, he was drinking at the bar in the Hotel Whittier, where the regulars were World War Two veterans with past glories and limited futures. Some had known his father. Chuckie, whose face showed the clawmarks of time, said, ‘You’re the spit’n’ image of him. Shame what happened to him.’

Jack, tasting his bourbon, said nothing.

‘He’s in a better place,’ Chuckie pronounced, and others agreed.

Jack lit a cigarette. ‘What makes you think so?’

‘I figure he bluffed his way into heaven and right away asked for the best accommodations.’

‘Here, here!’ someone shouted from the end of the bar.

‘Who killed him, Chuckie?’

‘I could name a dozen guys might’ve. Who’s to say?’ Chuckie downed a shot of rye. ‘Make sure what happened to him, Jack, doesn’t happen to you.’

The Whittier was kitty-corner from the post office, where Jack posted his letters to Gretchen. In a hurried hand he told her he missed her mightily and hungered to be with her again, without giving any indication when that might be. He asked about the condition of Billie Holiday records he had left behind and in a postscript told her he was putting money into real estate.

Gretchen wrote unhurried letters without mentioning the stress from his departure and her sense of disconnection from much that was around her, especially at the supply depot. She merely mentioned that her ear for languages had landed her a job with her own government. She and her mother were moving to Bonn. Her letters ended with ‘X’s for kisses.

A year passed before she scheduled a transatlantic call to him. The time difference made her evening his afternoon. She said, ‘I miss you, Jack.’

‘I miss you, too.’

She hesitated. ‘Have you met someone?’

He had met many women, none who counted. He said, ‘No.’

Again she hesitated. ‘Should I wait?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

His business card now listed him as a real-estate manager, though his sister-in-law called him a slumlord, for his rental properties were three-deckers verging on disrepair. His brother, who kept his books, defended him, but Marion would have none of it.

‘Slumlord is what I said and slumlord is what I meant.’ The three of them were eating at Lomazzo’s. Her eyes went from Edward to Jack. ‘You’ve had code violations. It was in the paper.’

‘He’s taken care of it,’ Edward said.

With a smile, Jack said, ‘You don’t like me, do you, Marion?’

‘I don’t like your ways.’

Edward said, ‘We’re all family. So let’s enjoy the meal.’

‘Pass the Parmesan,’ Jack said, and Marion did so with a grimace. He winked at her. ‘You oughta loosen up.’

‘Don’t tell me what I ought to do.’

‘Let’s not fight,’ Edward said.

Jack kept his eyes on her. ‘How long you been married?’

She raised her chin. ‘Figure it out yourself.’

‘Time you got pregnant, isn’t it?’

She started to speak, stopped and placed her napkin beside her plate. Rising stiffly, she peered down at her husband. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car.’ Then she was gone.

‘Jesus, Jack, that’s a sore subject.’

‘Sorry, kid. I didn’t know.’

‘I can’t stay.’

Jack watched Edward stumble away and then returned to his dinner. A warm feeling came over him when a married waitress from the old days paused to chat, a hand high on her hip, the honest smell from her underarm endearing to him.

Edward joined his wife in the car. He spoke, but Marion did not respond until they were halfway home. Staring straight ahead, she said, ‘Don’t ever take his side against me again.’

‘I didn’t know I did.’

She stiffened into another silence, which lasted until they were home and slipping into bed, where Edward kept his distance, his eyes wide open in the dark. ‘Do you have anything to say?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘He’s your brother, but it’s not like you owe him anything.’

‘He pays me well for the work I do for him.’

‘He should, you’re a good accountant. You have a future. He’s never going to be anything but a slumlord.’

‘You don’t know Jack,’ he wanted to say but kept quiet. He knew the Jack she didn’t, the Jack who had looked out for him and never let anyone bully him. Now he was out of Jack’s hands and in Marion’s.

Marion said, ‘What day is this?’

‘Thursday.’

‘If you want intercourse, I don’t mind.’

At the Whittier bar Chuckie said, ‘Whatcha doin’, Jacko, buying up all of Haverhill?’

Someone else said, ‘What d’you think of the Russkies flyin’ Sputniks over our heads? Ike should shoot ’em down.’

‘We do that,’ Jack said, ‘you guys might be fighting World War Two all over again.’

‘Hey, I’d do it, they raised me in rank.’

Chuckie said, ‘You still got a gal in Germany waitin’ for you, Jacko?’

‘I guess you could say that,’ Jack said. ‘She’s on hold.’

His letters to Gretchen were fragments and hers were less frequent. At the start of the new year she wrote, ‘I feel naked. Writing is so personal, the mind exposing its wiring. How long have you been gone, Jack? Long enough to be a ghost?’

‘I’m not a ghost,’ he wrote back. ‘Give me a little more time.’

In April she wrote, ‘Time mocks us. The Swiss knew that when they added a cuckoo to the clock.’ He chose to read little into that. Elsewhere in the letter she wrote, ‘We desperately want to believe in the Cartesian split. It doubles our value.’ He didn’t know what the hell she was talking about and didn’t ask.

He almost skipped the postscript, then glanced at it. ‘How much of the world is womb? All of it, do you suppose?’ He wondered whether she was herself.

He did not hear from her again until late August. ‘My mother died Tuesday. The funeral was yesterday. Seeing her off, I realised death is the ultimate privacy. There was no way I could talk to her. I wonder, Jack, do the dead know they’re gone?’

He immediately arranged for a transatlantic call. Two hours later he heard her voice and said, ‘Why didn’t you call me? I’d have flown right over.’

‘I didn’t see the need. I knew a long time ago you were never coming back.’

‘Come here,’ he said after a moment. ‘Come to the States. Please, Gretchen.’

‘I think it’s too late for anything like that, don’t you?’

‘It doesn’t have to be. Is there something you’re not telling me?’

‘What would that be, Jack?’

‘I don’t know.’ He was frustrated. ‘What’s the problem?’

She was silent for so long he was uncertain she was still on the line. Then she spoke. ‘Me, Jack. I’m the problem.’

He didn’t understand and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He told her he’d get back to her and he meant to. But he never did.

At this time Jack began buying dilapidated downtown properties at auction, which Edward considered unwise speculation. A few years later President Kennedy was dead and Jack reported sizeable profits from properties taken over by the Haverhill Redevelopment Authority.

‘Okay, you were right, I was wrong,’ Edward said. Part of the breakfast crowd, they were in a booth in the Presto Diner, below the railway bridge. The 7.20 to Boston rumbled overhead. ‘Unless you knew something I didn’t.’

Jack blew smoke from a Pall Mall. ‘When you hang around the right people, you hear things.’

Edward batted away the smoke. ‘That your secret?’

‘Little bit more to it than that, kid.’

‘Do me a favor, Jack. Don’t call me kid any more. Marion doesn’t like it. Tell the truth, I don’t either.’

‘Right. Sorry. You’re a man of means.’

Edward had on a new suit, one that now fit him. Rich food had extended his waistline. With Jack’s backing and in a building Jack owned, he had left the bank and opened an accounting office.

Jack snuffed out his cigarette.

Edward exaggerated a cough. ‘Thank God.’ Then he said, ‘Why can’t you and Marion be friends?’

‘Beats the hell out of me. Better ask her.’

‘Maybe if you made the effort. If you were a little polite instead of always trying to get a rise out of her.’

‘When she puts on that long face and looks down her nose at me, what am I supposed to do? Genuflect? That’s your job, kid.’

The waitress freshened Jack’s coffee. He plucked up the morning paper, which had lain unread near his elbow. Weeks had passed since Dallas, but Kennedy still dominated the news.

Sudden tears in his eyes, Jack tossed the paper aside. ‘I wish you had won the bet. Then he’d still be alive.’

‘I never felt the way you did about him,’ Edward said sullenly. ‘He was not a good president.’

‘He had style. Style, kid. That’s what he had.’

‘So did Dad. But that didn’t make him a good husband, did it?’

‘Didn’t make him a bad one. I was closer to Dad than you were, so maybe I knew him better.’

‘And maybe you didn’t know him at all. Mom told me things she never told you, the stuff he put her through. You want to hear some of it?’

‘What’s done is done.’

Edward was almost smiling. ‘You never wanted to know. That’s because you were his son, I was hers. Why don’t you admit Dad got what he deserved?’

‘Keep your voice down. Don’t embarrass us.’

‘You’re just like him. You’re all show, and you think you’re the cat’s miaow. Marion read you in a minute.’

Jack motioned for the check.

Edward’s smile was perceptible. ‘You still pretending you don’t know who killed him?’

‘I guess I always knew that,’ Jack said quietly. ‘What I don’t know is whether you helped her.’

‘I’ll let you guess about that.’ Edward reached for the check. ‘This is on me.’

‘You open a book, you open a door. Consider that a word to the wise, Edward.’

Edward worked twelve hours a day, more during tax time. He had added to his staff, moved to a larger office in his brother’s building and was annoyed when Jack began charging him rent, which Marion maintained was a move to get back at her. She believed she was the cause of the brothers’ unexpected coolness toward each other.

In the evening Edward stretched out to watch TV. His favorite programs, during which he usually dozed off, were Andy Griffith, Hogan’s Heroes and Bewitched. Marion occasionally watched the news, though she angrily shut it off when footage showed hippies and the like protesting the war in South-east Asia, some by torching the American flag.

When tax season was over, Edward reluctantly consented to a short vacation. They flew to Aruba, checked into an extravagant hotel, feasted on ocean delicacies in one of the three dining rooms and spent hours on the beach, where they sipped alcoholic fruit drinks and took in the sunstruck sights, which included mature women with bare breasts. Edward was shocked.

‘Don’t be so provincial,’ Marion murmured from behind outsize sunglasses. She was reading The Valley of the Dolls, a finger poised at the edge of the page.

‘I’m trying not to look,’ he said.

‘Look all you want. Just don’t gawk.’

‘You’d think they’d be embarrassed.’

‘They’re European.’

Edward squinted. ‘How do you know?’

‘They don’t worry about carrying an extra pound. And they don’t shave under their arms.’

‘I don’t find that attractive.’

Putting the book aside, she glanced at him. ‘You’d better rub more stuff on. You’re starting to burn again.’

‘I hate the smell of the stuff.’

‘Do it anyway.’

He squirted lotion from a flask, applied it to the top of his hot shoulders and dropped back to doze off. Marion stretched her legs, her lengthy body well-oiled, her navel a minnow afloat in sweat. In passing, a French-speaking couple smiled appraisingly, which enlarged her sense of herself. A while later she and a muscular man with a close beard stared fully at each other in a shared moment of sensuality. Had Edward not been there, she’d have chatted with him.

Waking, Edward rubbed his eyes, glanced over at her and was aghast. ‘What have you done?’ In a panic, he searched here, there, for the top of her bathing suit. ‘Where is it?’ he demanded.

‘Edward, relax!’

‘How long has it been off?’

‘Five minutes? Ten? What difference does it make?’

‘For me, please. Cover up.’

‘Do you see something wrong with them?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘What is the point?’

‘You’re not European.’

She slipped a hand behind her head, giving herself more relevance. Stubble shadowed her underarm. ‘Pretend I am.’

‘You’re my wife.’

‘Pretend I’m not,’ she said with a smile and retrieved the top of her bathing suit.

‘Thank God,’ he murmured.

She was glad he didn’t follow her down to the wet sand, where she stood somewhat majestically to welcome any eyes that might be on her. The gentle lap of waves gave her the sensation of someone breathing on her ankles. At home she fancied herself an artificial flower waiting to be real, but here the fancy was fact. She returned to Edward.

‘What were you doing?’ he asked.

‘Getting my feet kissed.’ She reached for her robe and tote bag. ‘Shall we?’

During the short walk back to the hotel Edward was sullen, as if his honor had been sorely tested and his dignity lessened, but in their room he turned contrite. ‘Marion, I’m sorry. I guess I just don’t understand what was going on back there.’

‘You should’ve been proud, not humiliated.’ She stood with her robe open. ‘Look at me, Edward. I’m in great shape, the best I’ll ever be in. Why shouldn’t I show off?’

With a half-nod, he sort of agreed.

She shucked her robe and both pieces of her bathing suit and posed. ‘So what do you think, Edward?’

He shivered. ‘You know what I think.’

‘Then let’s.’

‘Now? We’re all greasy.’

‘So what?’

On the bed, fully engaged, slipping and sliding, she was all squishy arms and legs, while he, all frantic thrust and thump, tried to dig in, maintain a balance, lengthen his presence. At one point he pitched to one side. ‘Stay with it,’ she urged as he tried hard not to flounder. ‘Go faster,’ she commanded.

Instead he paused. ‘Are you pretending I’m somebody else?’ he asked.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Is it Jack?’

‘He should be so lucky.’

With new resolve, he reasserted himself and held his place with the aid of her determined leg lock. Resuming his pace, he soon quickened it into what became a race where the winner would receive roses and kisses everywhere. In the fantasy he outdistanced all others, even himself.

Two days later they returned to Haverhill, Marion with a glorious tan, Edward with a sunburn, for which he consulted a doctor, who told him he should have known better and would have to suffer through it.

The young woman slid out of bed, found something to slip on and with a look of understanding left the room.

Jack spoke into the phone. ‘Is something wrong? . . . I can’t hear you . . . Yes, of course I can. The Algonquin? I’ll catch a shuttle out of Boston . . . Gretchen, this is a wonderful surprise . . . What? Yes. See you in a few hours.’

The young woman lay in the embrace of hot bathwater. Looking in on her, he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You know I don’t demand anything from you.’

He knelt by the tub and sponged her shoulders. ‘It’s someone I knew a long time ago.’

She looked up with near-sighted blue eyes. ‘You don’t have to explain. I’ll be out of the tub in a minute.’

He rose. ‘I’ll make it up to you, Sally.’

‘You don’t owe me a thing.’

Recklessly weaving in and out of lanes on Route lA, he sped to Logan in record time. Inside the terminal he strode toward the ticket booth as if he were back in the army with a sergeant’s Hup! Hup! keeping him in step. No delays. A shuttle got him to LaGuardia within the hour and a taxi delivered him to the Algonquin. The desk clerk rang Gretchen’s room. Jack expected to go up, but she came down, stepping from the elevator with her hair shorter than he remembered, her face thinner, her whole appearance altered in some subtle way that disquieted him.

‘Gretchen.’

He wanted to kiss her but managed only to brush her cheek when she moved her head. Suddenly he felt like a stranger.

‘Hello, Jack.’

In the oak-paneled lounge, warm with voices, they sat in cushiony chairs at a small table.

She smiled. ‘You haven’t changed much. Still the handsome American.’

‘It’s been too long,’ he said, and she seemed to nod. A waiter brought drinks, cognac for her, bourbon for him, which he needed. ‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’

‘What would that be, Jack?’

‘Maybe you’ll tell me.’

She tasted the cognac. ‘I always wanted to see the Algonquin. I’m a fan of Dorothy Parker.’

The name meant nothing to him. He said, ‘Are you ill?’

She glanced toward other tables, as if seeking faces of celebrities, interesting candidates available. A man whose gaunt good looks emanated an introspective air. An elegantly dressed woman who seemed a careful copy of an actress long dead.

‘How bad?’ Jack asked.

‘How bad does it have to be?’

‘You’re not telling me anything. Am I supposed to guess?’

‘That would be asking too much. I have something to show you.’ She extracted a small photograph from her bag, passed it over and watched his expression slowly tighten. ‘Is there any doubt?’ she asked.

‘How old is she?’

‘Do the arithmetic.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t want you marrying me for only that reason and I knew you would have.’

He held on to the photo. It was precious and his now, and he continued to stare at it.

‘Actually she’s all you, isn’t she, Jack? Physically, damn little of me.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Elsa. After my mother.’

Jack snared the waiter’s eye. He wanted another bourbon and was silent until it arrived. ‘Why did you wait till now to tell me?’

‘I want you to acknowledge she’s yours and I want you to adopt her. A lawyer here in the city has the papers for you to sign. Your State Department has made it possible.’

‘The State Department, that’s pretty high level. What’s going on, Gretchen?’

She smiled ruefully. ‘After you left, your intelligence people pulled me in. They knew about the black-marketing and held it over me. We both could’ve been prosecuted, but they gave me an option. While working for my government I went back on the payroll with yours.’

‘You’re a spy?’

‘What’s the harm? We’re all on the same side against Communism, except Uncle Sam is paranoid and trusts nobody.’

He continued to stare at the photo, somewhat in wonder.

‘I’ve never hidden you from her, Jack. She has a picture of you in your soldier suit and she’s always known that some day she’d meet you.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Private school. Switzerland.’

‘When do I sign the papers?’

She touched his hand. ‘Tomorrow at ten.’

Jack scarcely touched his filet mignon but consumed another bourbon. The waiter asked if everything was satisfactory, and Jack nodded and ordered coffee. To Gretchen, he said, ‘Are you in any danger?’

‘None whatsoever.’

‘Then it’s your health.’