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received a late-night call. Charles had found Alicia in their garden, dressed in her debutante’s gown, its silk glistening in the thin silver moonlight. Levy felt a chill at the image, and at the flatness in Charles’s tone as he said now:
    â€œWell, no point in being sentimental. HUAC nips at my heels while the patriarch sits on his hands; I’ve got Zelda for a wife, a four-month-old son, and my sex life is giving me hairy palms.” He rose, shrugging on his coat. “I’d better think of what to do.”
    â€œI suppose so.” Hesitant, Levy added, “Look, I know my timing’s awful, but you remember me telling you about Ruth, my sister?”
    Charles looked curious. “That imminent threat to Maxwell Perkins? Has she passed puberty?”
    Levy nodded, uncomfortable. “She’s copy-editing at Time now. But she wants to work with fiction.”
    â€œShe could always write their editorials.”
    Levy looked away. “I’m sorry, Charles. I’d promised to say something next time I saw you.”
    Charles waved a hand as he moved toward the door. “Oh, send her in, Sigmund, send her in. I made a dubious shrink out of you, I can surely make a bad editor of her. It’s probably stamped on her genetic code.” He turned in the doorway to catch Levy’s smile of surprise. “You’re still liking this work, I take it.”
    â€œSometimes it’s hard. It’s hard now. But yes, I like it.”
    Charles smiled, the ghost of his college grin. “Well, I suppose that’s something.” He gave the coat a final shrug, squared his shoulders, and then paused. “You know, it’s funny, Bill—this time I’m the father.”
    For a moment the two friends, first sons of their fathers, smiled at each other. And then Charles Carey turned and left, closing the door behind him.
    As it shut, Levy remembered Charles, driven by some solitary winter mood, slipping from their dormitory into the cool night. It was late; only Levy saw him. Snow had fallen, gray as ashes, and swirled at Carey’s feet. He moved into the shadows, lean and graceful and alone, until he became one of them. Levy had felt a momentary fear, was captured by the image: one lone man watching through his window as the other, merging with the unknown dark, steals his imagination. For that brief instant, Levy had believed that Charles Carey’s fate would also be his own.
    Watching the infant Peter sleep, Charles tried remembering his own father.
    The five-year-old Charles had stood stiffly in Penn Station, waiting with Phillip and their mother for John Carey to return from weeks of selling, toting his black trunk. It had held few presents, even for Ellen Carey. Her hand was cool and dry, the face she wore for her sons still expectant and serene amidst the rush of passengers and porters with luggage, the litany of trains leaving for strange places, gasping steam as they departed. Next to her, Charles would close his eyes and try recalling his father’s face. He could never quite remember. Then his mother would squeeze his hand, saying, “Here he is,” and Charles would strain once more to absorb John Carey’s features as he strode toward them: black, bushy eyebrows, fierce black eyes snapping from granite planes all surfaces and angles, jaw jutting like a prow. Three-year-old Phillip would hide behind his mother.
    John Carey would shake each son’s hand and kiss his wife once, on the cheek. She had died from cancer when Charles was fifteen. In Charles’s mind she had died from lack of love.
    Undemonstrative with women, he began holding Peter often, smelling the newness of his skin. But, looking for some change in Allie, he saw only jealousy. He spent more time with Peter.
    That Thanksgiving, Peter learned to crawl.
    Charles had been playing with him after dinner, in Peter’s room. Allie looked in on them; suddenly, as if hurt by