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faces when Vronsky’s and Anna Karenina’s eyes meet. Kate wonders exactly how far along these two really are. Is it too late to stop them?
    “So, Hampton,” Kate says, “tell me. I hear all about Iris from Daniel, but nothing about you.You’re in the city most of the time?”
    “I come up here on the weekend,” Hampton says. “During the work-week, I stay at the apartment where we used to live before Iris got into Marlowe.”
    “It’s a beautiful apartment,” Iris says. She glances at Hampton, who smiles at her.
    a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
    “So what keeps you down in the city all week?” Kate asks.
    “I’m co–managing director of the Atlantic Fund,” Hampton says.
    “He’s an investment banker,” Iris says, in the same anxious-to-please tone in which she said their apartment was beautiful.To Kate, Iris sounds like a woman whose husband has complained about how she treats him in public.
    “The Atlantic Fund provides capital to African-American business,”
    Hampton says. “It’s sometimes difficult for black-owned businesses to get what they need from the white banking structure.” He cranes his neck, looks for the waiter. “Just like it’s hard to get a white waiter to bring you a drink.” He breathes out so hard his cheeks puff for a moment. “I’ve never come here, and now I know why.”
    “Have we really been waiting that long?” asks Kate. “It seems like we just sat down.” She looks to Daniel for confirmation, but all Daniel can manage is a shrug. He is on a plane and he has just heard something in the pitch of the engine’s roar that makes him feel the flight is doomed.
    “God, that music was so wonderful,” Iris says.
    “The first time I heard Handel’s Messiah, I was four years old,” Hampton says, his eyes on Kate. “My grandmother was in a chorus that performed it for Richard Nixon, at the White House.” This comment is in keeping with remarks he’s been making since they left the church. Already they’d heard references to his grandfather’s Harvard roommate, his great-grandfather’s Presbyterian mission in the Congo, his mother’s spending five thousand dollars on haute couture in Paris when she was eleven years old, his aunt Dorothy’s short engagement to Colin Powell, the suspicious fire at the Welles vacation compound on Martha’s Vine-yard. He boasts about his lineage in a way that Kate thinks would simply not be allowed from a white person.
    “Thurgood Marshall was a friend of the family and he was there, too, of course. Unfortunately, he fell asleep after ten minutes. Gramma said they all sang extra loud to cover Justice Marshall’s snoring.”
    Kate wonders if Hampton is trying to put Daniel on alert. He, too, must sense what’s happening. She has to admit that she is enjoying this
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    foursome more than she’d dared hope. It captures her imagination in some creepy, achey way, like sucking on a tooth that’s just starting to die.
    “Is this the same grandmother who played the cello?” she asks. Maybe if you thought a little less about your grandmother’s pedigree and a little more about your wife, she wouldn’t be squirming in her chair and eyeing my boyfriend.
    “No, the cellist was Abigail Welles, of Boston, my father’s mother.The singing grandma was Lucille Cox, of Atlanta, on my mother’s side.”
    “I have many Coxes in my family,” Kate says. “On my mother’s side, many of them from Georgia, too.”
    There is a brief silence, and then Kate says what she guesses must be passing through everyone’s mind. “Of course, there’s a chance that one of my Coxes held one of your Coxes in slavery.”
    “In that case,” says Daniel, lifting his wine glass, “dinner’s on us.”
    For the first time that evening, Hampton smiles. Beaming, his face grows younger. His teeth are large, even, and very white, and he casts his eye downward, as if the moment’s pleasure makes him shy. Kate can imagine the moment when Iris first saw that