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life itself had gnawed at him ceaselessly, stripping off the flesh, leaving only bare and shattered bone.” But along with these remains, there was a bit of spirit, too, and when Pastor James came around one morning in a reforming mood and asked him if he believed in hell, Mr. Brennan had the strength of character to reply, “You mean, after this one?”
    The house they moved into was only a few blocks down Wilmot Street from our own. It was of modest size, though certainly large enough for two people. It had weathered gray shingles, white clapboard siding, and a dormered roof with one window for each of the two upstairs bedrooms. Mr. Brennan never bothered to furnish it with anything beyond the bare minimum required for human habitation. The living room had one hardwood-and-rattan occasional chair, one press-back armchair, and a single worn settee of more or less Shaker austerity. In his own room upstairs there was a simple metal bed and, oddly out of place, an enormous hall mirror chair upon which Mr. Brennan piled his clothes, leaving the tiny closet empty. There was a wooden half-bed in Elizabeth’s room. It was painted light blue, and some sort of Polynesian jungle scene was carved into the headboard and painted in florid reds and greens. Several short barrister bookshelves stood against the walls, the volumes arranged neatly and catalogued by subject. The floors remained rugless, the windows curtainless. “That house was Mr. Brennan’s monastery,” Elena once said, “and his god was gloom.”
    All the work of this disordered household fell to Elizabeth, and she performed it with tireless dedication. She made the meals, dusted, mopped, poured the water from the ice chest, and swept the porch. And despite all this drudgery, she never appeared unhappy. Elena called her Jennifer in New England Maid , and said that for her “life was the grand rich uncle of whom one is never to ask a favor.”
    Elizabeth’s one great pleasure was reading, and in this her father fully indulged her. I would often see the two of them making their way to the Standhope Library, Elizabeth skipping ahead while her father trudged heavily behind in his baggy gray pants. He would wait for her outside the library, slumped on the steps, smoking a cigar or wiping his sweaty pink face with a dark blue handkerchief. He would wait for as long as necessary, listlessly staring down the street as if waiting for some signal to begin his life again. Then when Elizabeth finally came through the door, he would grasp the bannister and pull himself to his feet, sweep the large stack of books from Elizabeth’s arms, and walk her safely home.
    As might be imagined, Elizabeth’s reading served her very well indeed. Most children in Standhope had little interest in learning more than was minimally required for progressing to the next grade, and so from the first day of her arrival at school, Elizabeth stood out from the rest. For her mind was not only quick but filled with a curious assortment of information that no one else seemed to have.
    â€œShe knows everything,” Elena told me excitedly after their first meeting.
    I was aimlessly sitting on the front lawn. I looked up and saw that Elena was smiling very brightly.
    â€œShe knows the names of all the trees,” she added quickly, “and she knows about strange animals, too. Did you know there’s a fish that lives in a cave and it’s so dark that the fish don’t have eyes?”
    â€œOf course I knew that,” I said, lying through my teeth.
    â€œYou never told me about them,” Elena said. She looked offended, as if I had purposefully kept something from her.
    I shrugged. “Why should I? They’re just fish.”
    â€œYou should talk to Elizabeth sometime, William,” Elena insisted. “You really should. You’d like her a lot.”
    I grunted doubtfully, then waved my hand, dismissing the idea.
    â€œYou