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attack and had probably died instantly. His top half was on the bare mattress, his feet were on the floor. It felt like it was a hundred degrees inside that apartment; the smell was something Paul would never forget. He knew his father was dead, but he didn’t know you were supposed to call the police when someone died. He thought this was a family matter and what must be done was to put his father upright, cover his nakedness, and then figure out how to get the body back to Connecticut where he and his mother and sister could bury it. With his hand over his nose and mouth, Paul approached the body, peered into his father’s ruined face. He tried to lift Matthew, and, for a moment, he succeeded, but then the worst thing happened. The body slowly came down like a drawbridge, and try as he might Paul could do nothing to stop it until it was on top of him. At first, he couldn’t utter a sound, and then he cried out for his mother. He began to shout. The weight, the odor, the great and terrible darkness closing in. He pushed Matthew’s lifeless, expressionless face away from his. He must have done it more roughly than he realized, and the push left a mark.
    For years after his father’s death, Paul walked by the apartment house whenever he came to the city—it seemed disloyal and callous not to, especially since Matthew had been cremated and there was no grave to visit. But by the time he turned twenty, he was making the sad pilgrimage less and less often, and now as the traffic dumps him out onto First Avenue, he realizes he has not seen his father’s apartment house in maybe eight years.
    Approaching 90th Street, he sees that the little shop where Matthew bought his art supplies has been turned into a Verizon store, and Zurich and Kaufman Quality Shoes has been turned into a coffee boutique, and, worse, the very building in which Matthew lived and died has been razed, along with the buildings on either side. In their place has been built a glass-and-steel apartment building calling itself The Verdi, a twenty-story hive of windowsills and reflecting glass, indistinguishable from hundreds of nearly identical buildings all over town. Paul doesn’t even slow down; his thoughts disappear behind an engulfing blankness. If I hurry , he thinks, I can make the light before it turns red .
    On the way out of the city, there is a long, infuriating delay—minutes pass, a quarter hour, half an hour, forty-five minutes. He is surrounded by the rumble of idling engines, heartsick over the wasted day, yet he is in no hurry to get back to Leyden. He would like to see something beautiful that might neutralize the sourness of the day. Halfway up the Saw Mill Parkway, and finally free of the city’s gravitational pull, Paul exits the highway on a sudden impulse, and heads toward a two-thousand-acre park he came to know the year before, when he was working in Westchester, building a wine cellar for a French banker. The road follows the shoreline of a man-made lagoon full of Canada geese rocking back and forth like hundreds of little boats, then he turns onto a county blacktop and the approach to Martingham State Park.
    The booth at the park’s east entrance is boarded up for the winter, and leaves blow this way and that across the stripes of the parking lot. The maple leaves are gaily colored red, orange, and yellow; the oaks are somber brown, like bread crust, though some have a tinge of what looks like dried blood.
    Paul parks and walks along a footpath, a quarter of a mile into the woods, past pine, spruce, hemlock, locust, oak, and maple, all permitted by state decree to flourish and age, with time their only natural enemy. The pine rots when it dies, growing softer, more and more fragrant. The maple and the birch, the alder and the black cherry refuse to die. Even if they are cut down, they send up a new crown of leaves as quickly as possible, new growth eager for the sun. The leaves beneath Paul’s feet are starting to decompose;