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was dead). Pressed, Julia probably could not have come up with an aspect of her life with which her mother was pleased; but, as so often, the distaste was mutual, the two of them locked forever in the prison of the animosity formed back in Julia’s adolescence, when Mona said it was none of her children’s business which of her several boyfriends was their actual father, or whom she married, or how often.
    “Thanks for calling, Mona. It’s great to hear your voice.”
    “You’ll miss me when I’m gone, Julia Anne”—what Mona called her when annoyed.
    “Come for Christmas.”
    But the invitation brought only a lecture on why it was wrong to celebrate holidays so hegemonic and culturally exclusive. Thanksgiving, too, arriving next week, took its knocks. The United States of America, Mona reminded her daughter sternly, was the source of most of the world’s misery, and to offer thanks for the blessings of a nation built on slaughter was not piety but hypocrisy. She said much the same in the steady stream of feverish letters still duly published by the various journals and newspapers whose editors remembered who Mona Veazie was, or once had been.
    “Oh, right. I’d kind of forgotten.”
    “You can take that tone with me all you want, Julia Anne. But you can’t change the facts. Your Kellen was dirty. He was a fraud. All he cared about was money.” A pause, but the awaited contradiction was not forthcoming. “It’s true, dear. You’ll see.”
    “He wasn’t my Kellen,” said Julia, although, once upon a time, he was.
    (III)
    A FTER LUNCH WITH B ORIS, she headed not back to her office but to the parking lot, because she had to see her dentist about the tooth she chipped in the accident. She panicked for an instant when she could not find the Escalade, and then remembered that it was in the shop for a new dashboard, air bags, and bumper. She had come to work in the reliable old Volvo wagon, copper-colored and medium rusty, manufactured back when doors unlocked with keys and air bags were a mysterious luxury. From the day she earned her license to the day she torched the Mercedes, Vanessa had been the principal driver of the wagon. Now Vanessa was not allowed behind the wheel. Julia hesitated before climbing in. The lot was overcrowded: the divinity school shared it with the Hilliman Social Science Tower, the hideous glass-walled monstrosity on the other side of Hudson Street, which ran like a river separating the two ways of explaining the world. Invited a couple of years ago to lecture at Kepler on the separation of church and state, Lemaster had argued that the divinity school should be “an island of transcendent clarity in a sea of secular confusion.” She had made the mistake of repeating the line to Kellen, who had laughed.
Every discipline thinks it’s a clever little island with exclusive access to the truth, Julia,
he had scolded her.
All that makes the div school different is that not even your own graduates agree.
    Twenty-odd years since Kellen suddenly blurred and burdened. Twenty years of marriage, twenty years of motherhood, fourteen here in the city, and the past six in the Landing. They had built their ostentatious house with Lemaster’s consulting income and a good chunk of her inheritance from Granny Vee. Now, with Lemaster six months into the presidency of the university, they were preparing to move to the ancient mansion she could just see, beyond the scaffolding, farther down the hill.
    It occurred to her that the mansion, too, stood in the shadow of Hilliman Tower.
    Julia gazed at the winking green glass. Kellen’s spacious office had been up there, on the sixth floor of Hilliman, where the movers and shakers sat, looking down on everybody else, for Hudson Street ran downhill toward the Gothic sprawl of the campus proper. She had never mentioned to a soul that she could see Kellen’s window from her first-floor office, but suspected he knew. She had trained herself not to look too