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a John Wayne double feature."
    "John Wayne goes to war?"
    "I guess so."
    "Germans or Japanese?"
    "Japs, I think."
    Axel Behl was silent a moment, leaning back, his hands flat on the table.
    "It's only a movie," the boy said.
    "I saw one once," he said. "The White House last summer. Mr. Truman invited us over. I made myself go and it wasn't easy. I swore I never would, but when you're invited to the White House, you go. Such tripe. One lie after another, and when you added up all the little lies you had a big lie the size of the Matterhorn. I left halfway through, pleading fatigue. Couldn't stand it. Hated every minute." He began to drum his fingers on the table, looking again into the middle distance.
    "I know," the boy said. Talking to his father was like walking through a minefield: one false step and you were on your back, minus an arm or a leg.
    "No, you don't."
    "Then tell me," the boy said quickly, the words out before he could bring them back. His father had never spoken about the war and made it clear he didn't want to be asked about it. His war was so profoundly intimate that it could not be shared; at least he did not share it.
    "Propaganda," he said suddenly.
    "What's propaganda?" the boy asked.
    "A rhapsody," Axel said. "A bully's love song."
    "You walked out of a movie in the White House?" The boy wanted his father to keep talking, to tell him about the war even if it was his own false rhapsody. He had the right to tell any story he wanted, at whatever length or to whatever purpose. He could use the historical facts or invent his own; it wouldn't matter. But he did not have the right to remain silent, keep things to himself, withhold evidence. What had happened to Captain Axel Barkin Behl in the war was their common property. They both lived with the consequences and would go on living with them. This was the way the world worked, and this was their fate. His father was crippled and his mother was gone and there remained only the two of them to face the wide world. And the world was not indifferent.
    "Do you remember which movie it was?"
    But Axel was silent, his eyes half-lidded, his fingers again tracing the cicatrix that carved his face. He had been startlingly handsome as a young man before the war. Everyone said so and the family photographs proved it, Axel in black tie, Axel in tennis whites, not a hair out of place, the part in the center of his skull as straight as a sword's blade. But it was hard for Alec to recall the prewar years. What he remembered was a private hospital in Belgravia, its cream-colored façade suggesting a villa in the Levant, his father on the third floor bandaged head to foot, his eyes glazed and staring from a hole in the rough gauze. His mother's gloved hand pushed him forward to give Daddy a kiss. But she did not say where, so he kissed the bandaged cheek and watched his father wink. Later, when Axel was home with most of the bandages off, Alec did not want to remember him as he had been. That memory was indecent.
    The silence lengthened. The boy looked into the candlelight and willed his father to speak. How difficult could it be to give voice to the events of your own life, to speak so that others could understand the shadow-line that divided youth from maturity? Did it involve betrayal? Was it simple stupidity or plain misfortune, obvious bad luck of the sort that everyone encountered every single day? He had gone away a healthy young man and returned a wretched old one, and this seemed to happen overnight. The circumstances were mysterious, and his silence only made them more so, and sinister besides.
    Axel smiled. "They say that good judgment comes from experience. And experience comes from bad judgment."
    Alec laughed even though he had heard the expression many times.
    Axel said abruptly, "As you know, I went to France in early 'forty-two. Fred Greene and I were put ashore in Brittany. You might remember Fred, big redheaded fellow, hot-tempered. Wonderful pianist; he knew