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remember most fondly? Something out of the ordinary. Not one of your damned shoots. Not the movie star. Something unexpected. Tell me something I can actually believe. Something about early days in Washington, when you were young. Something about private life. Something refreshing about the way we lived back then. Or the way you lived. I know the way I lived. Your life has always been a mystery to me, Alec. Not an unpleasant mystery but a mystery nonetheless. I've never cared for mysteries or riddles. They interfere with the legislative process. Isn't the point always to get things done? Have something to show for your day? I care even less for irony, the refuge of scoundrels who need an excuse for their refusal to act. To put a marker down. To bring things to a conclusion. So talk all you want. I'll be listening carefully even though I may close my eyes. Cheat on me and I'll know it from your tone of voice.
    Speak up so I can hear, his father added, and with an unsteady hand he raised his glass, rattling the ice cubes.
    More ice, please.

LUCIA
    A LEC WAS SILENT a minute or more, allowing his memory to drift backward to a vanished civilization as mysterious as Phoenicia. His memories of it were scattered and not entirely reliable. What did he remember most fondly? Alec supposed it was his rose garden. In that soft southern climate anything that germinated would grow but roses grew wonderfully. They had no natural enemies except blight, old age, and insects. When Lucia first arrived in the capital from Zurich she noticed gardens full of roses and longed for a garden of her own. She believed, incorrectly, that Washington was a city of gardeners. She did come to understand eventually that Washington was a city of lookers at gardens, quite another thing surely.
    Lucia found the people hospitable but their argot irritated her. Washingtonians liked to refer to
this town,
often with a roll of the eyeballs, as in, We do things a certain way in
this town. This town,
the odds are always six to five against. Lucia thought the city blanched, an overcooked vegetable. In high summer Washington was a metropolis of civic torpor, heavy velvety heat that clung to your skin like a cape. The tour buses moved in slow motion and when they halted at the Treasury or the Lincoln Memorial their passengers seemed to ooze from the interior, a slow-flowing damp-shirted civilian tide unaware that they were visiting a ghost town. Statecraft came to a standstill in the killing summer heat. The government evacuated to the Virginia horse country or the Eastern Shore or New England in the way that Madrid emptied into San Sebastian or the hill towns of Andalusia and Paris to Brittany or the Cote d'Azur. August was a lost month. Even the newspapers operated with skeleton staffs. Still, those workers who remained were careful to wear suits and ties and the women dresses. The government had its formal aspect.
    After a furious courtship Alec and Lucia found a small row house on a quiet street in Georgetown, the historic district, well away from the commotion of the Federal Triangle. A family-owned dry cleaner occupied one corner, a one-room market the corner opposite. At any time of day a housekeeper could be seen carrying an armload of clothes to or from the dry cleaner. At two in the afternoon the brick sidewalks echoed from the high heels of well-dressed women returning from lunch or an appointment at the hairdresser, and a few hours later the faintly hilarious voices of the Bridge Bunch, a dozen women who had been gathering at Mrs. Wheatley's house since the early days of the Truman administration, second and third Tuesdays of every month except August, when Mrs. Wheatley and her staff motored to an oceanside cottage at Newport. Alec's mother was one of the regulars. There were not so many men on the street during the day, save for the esthete Ronald diAntonio who liked to walk his Afghan hound at four, and Admiral Honeycutt who took a brisk constitutional at