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Sherm said. ‘Over the dam. Let it be.’
    I have to laugh. He’s a natural pacifier—even when the offense is his own.
    ‘As a matter of fact,’ Gemma says, ‘We were asked—to this one.’
    The room grows quiet the way a city room does—just enough to hear the caterwauling outside. Since ours is in a four-story in a cul-de-sac, we may also hear anybody traipsing down the front steps into the areaway to ring Mr Quinn’s bell.
    ‘And you didn’t go?’ Kit’s face is so naively aghast that I like her again. She would go if Judas sat in the Oval Office. And would wear that pendant of hers.
    ‘Gemma had nothing to wear,’ I say. She does, of course, including some beauties brought by Christina, now all laid by. Only Francesca could persuade Gemma to wear them, taking her mother out to some fancy place to show both of them off.
    ‘Come on ,’ Kit said. ‘I know that fawn Italian suit, for one. And others. You could have asked me to help pick.’
    ‘It wasn’t Gemma, Ki -it,’ Sherm says between his teeth, the tone so venomous that I and Gemma have to stare into our laps. It’s a revelation, after so long. She’s not naive, our scatty Kit. She’s a mite stupid—and Sherm hates her for it.
    ‘Your hide’s always been too thin,’ he said to me. ‘Too thin for your own good.’
    Too late now, he means.
    And it is. For both of us.
    I see Gemma’s chin jut forward. As her flesh withers, one can see Francesca’s bones emerge. ‘It’s not modesty. He had one subject. And he stuck to it.’
    So did Sherm. Back and forth, under and over those barricades. But I won’t twit him for it now. For Gemma, using the past tense, as we all can hear, is using it for all of us.
    ‘Maybe we shouldn’t of come,’ Kit says. Maybe she’s not that stupid.
    ‘Oh I dunno—’ Gemma says, ‘if one has to hear the worst, nice to be able to depend on one’s friends.’
    She sees my astonishment. She’s never been catty.
    ‘Wish to Gaw-ud it could be the best, Rupert.’ Sherm almost groans it. ‘But they don’t ask me down here much lately.’
    Then what’s he and Kit here for? Spring used to be his season. Any prize committee going, Sherm would be on it, handing out the medals and the money as if these came from him personally, he and Kit meanwhile staying at the Algonquin for free. And arranging for next winter. By which time somebody in the cultural world who has heard that their old bones won’t take country Spartan anymore, will have lent them a city flat. Sherm keeps track of those going on sabbatical, and prefers Boston. Kit does well with the millionaires who are going south, or leaving it.
    He used to tell me whenever he’d lobbied for a prize for me. But I never did well for him.
    ‘Where were you, this winter?’ Gemma said.
    There was a pause.
    ‘Daphne took us,’ Kit said.
    It wrung me. The way she said that.
    Gemma too. ‘Must have been beautiful out there,’ she said. ‘California.’ But her glance around the room, at the sun now an ember in the west outside our fire-escape terrace, told me she too was numbering our blessings. Including the Prendergast.
    ‘We rescued the child, anyway,’ Sherm said grimly. ‘At least—for the time we were there.’ He shook his head, that oversized benignity which looks so well on rostrums. ‘At least we did that.’
    Kit is almost in tears. Adversity never brought us together before. But then—it was never before theirs.
    ‘We did get to London,’ she said. ‘Daphne and her friend Erda gave us that.’ She bit her thumb. ‘ Erda and Daphne.’
    We could see that scene—and hear her correction.
    Sherm reached for his glass. ‘Mind if I have another?’
    ‘Serve yourself,’ I said.
    He surveys the bottles. ‘What an array. And more in the sideboard, eh?’
    I watch him switch to the marc. Gemma moves to give him a fresh glass but he waves her away. ‘All goes the same route.’
    He drinks with the same air of restrained gusto that he has