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together now—drinking martinis, watching Hill Street Blues and Dynasty, and taking semiannual trips to Europe—for more than a decade.
    “Sure you won’t have a drink, Julian?”
    “No thanks, Gus.”
    He set the tray down on the low iron table and beganpouring the clear diamondlike liquid evenly into the glasses. He spoke with a mild lisp and walked with a slight limp. His real life, Gus liked to say, began not on Beacon Hill, where he’d been born into a prosperous Boston family, but in France, where during the last months of the war he’d ended up playing clarinet in an Army band led by a gifted young jazz pianist named Dave Brubeck. They’d performed for the troops all over the European front; once they’d even opened for the Andrews Sisters. A lean introspective boy in youth, the war had woken in Gus appetites and joys he’d sensed in himself but never officially recognized. And now, decades later, with so much behind him, it was his privilege to have a martini and let his thoughts wander back: the band, on their way to a gig, getting lost in the Ardennes behind enemy lines; the jamming with Brubeck on the back of a truck otherwise filled with chickens. The girls! It was a piano, leaned on by the formidable derrière of a woman from Nantes, that had rolled over his foot and given him the limp. It wasn’t his intention to make light of the war—too many of his friends had died—but Christ, once back home and conscripted (this time for life) into the family law firm, never had he missed anything so much as the waking dream of those days, mornings when he woke hearing, over the drone of turbines and the brave whistling of homesick men, the constant rhythm and jump of jazz in his head.
    Mary said, “Gus, Julian has been amusing himself at the expense of poor Misha’s vanished testicles.”
    “Has he, now?” An eyebrow amiably cocked, Gus handed her a martini. His age-spotted hand shook, spilling some ofthe drink onto the grass. “Well then, I’d hate to hear what he’d have to say about me when I wasn’t around.”
    “Oh, a great deal, I should imagine.”
    They shared a private smile.
    Mary picked up her book again—P. N. Furbank on E. M. Forster—and Gus, hitching up his pants, sat down with his drink and his memories.
    Above our heads birds sang boisterously in the trees. The old trees, thick with leaves, on the old street. This was the beginning of the Golden Mile of manses that stretched almost to Fresh Pond Parkway. Longfellow had lived nearby, Hawthorne too. H. H. Richardson had designed houses for the rich. A sense of original privilege, of enlightened remove from the heedless, hectoring pace of the unreflecting multitude, persisted here as an embodiment of exalted New England stateliness and the founding ideals of Harvard itself. Ideals meant to be irrefutable, I supposed. A stateliness oppressive, it often seemed to me, for being so certain of its claims.
    A low stone wall with an iron gate surrounded Mary’s garden. Across the street stood a more recent building made of plain red brick—a general dorm for grad students, many of them foreign, who had nowhere else to stay. The dining hall was on the ground floor. During the long winter months when daylight was as scarce as wartime rations and the city was dark by five o’clock, I’d stood in my bedroom spying down through the windows at the big hall lit like a sunken stage. The stark wooden tables occupied by solitary men and women—grown students like myself—who routinely ate their dinners while reading.
    “Gus and I are planning a little trip to the Veneto,” Mary said.
    I looked at her. Her glass was empty and her eyes brighter and two gentle blossomings, like wilted rose petals under rice paper, had appeared on her cheeks.
    “When?”
    “We leave the fourteenth, I believe. Is it, Gus?”
    “Fifteenth,” Gus replied, swallowing the last of his drink. “The fourteenth’s Bastille Day.”
    “So it is! Of course, that’s