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about what had happened for six months and kept Alfred’s mail on his desk, as if he would return any moment.
    In my own generation, various cousins gave rollicking parties in the 1970s and 1980s with half-naked guests at the poolpassing joints and others indoors watching X-rated videos on large-format TVs. “Lust was more sacred than marriage.” There were divorces, estrangements, secret liaisons, remarriages, marriages to Gentiles, multiple sets of children. Still, the family has held together. M.A. had two sons and a daughter, all of whom married and multiplied, producing new Lightmans. His sister, Regina (Mamele), with multiple husbands, also produced many new offspring—including Lennie, who gaily followed in her mother’s footsteps. At last count, there were some one hundred and twenty descendants of Papa Joe living in Memphis and the South, sprinkled in time like the stony dust from his quarry.
    It is late afternoon, and Aunt Lila has come down from her nap. She must be in her mid-eighties. As she walks into the room, all of the males instinctively rise from their chairs. Uncle Harry gives her a frisky pat on her bum, which she returns with a coquettish smile. “What a confabulation,” says Lila, using one of her favorite words and pronouncing it with a drawl so slow you can count each syllable lining up and waiting its turn to tumble out of her mouth.
    Although only family members are here, Lila has put on her lipstick and eye shadow and is immaculately dressed in her customary outfit: a tailored pants suit, a pale pastel scarf, and a Louis Vuitton handbag on her arm. Lila has the face of a woman twenty years younger. When she hit sixty, she and Harry stole off to California for plastic surgery, returning after a month with diaphanous stories of the wonderful “golf.” Aunt Lila is the most proper woman of the family. No one would dream of using a crude word or raising a voice in Lila’s presence. In the warmer months, Lila will sometimes change her blouse four times a day to avoid the unseemly sight of sweat rings under her arms. Harry remembers an occasion when he and Lila and friends were outdriving one warm afternoon and desired some ice cream. The other husband ran into a shop, emerged with four vanilla cones, and off they went. While everyone slurped and licked, Lila stared at her ice cream in a state of paralysis. Her mother had taught her never to
lick
anything, and certainly not in public. Then the ice cream began to melt and drip. Eventually she had no choice but to begin taking large bites, which presented other problems.
    Lila is the living embodiment of the white columns of southern mansions. Fresh from her nap, she pats down the collar of her blouse, sits correctly in one of the embroidered chairs, and quietly listens to the conversation. Dorothy, without being told, serves cocktails.
    Cousins and their children and
their
children wander and crawl about, munching on crackers and snacks, laughing, spilling out into the dark living room with its hulking grand piano like some large sleeping animal. M.A., dead for fifty years but captured in a photograph on the card table, looks out with kindness on the confusion. In another era, just home from the office, he would have been stretched out on the sofa taking one of his famous twenty-minute naps, a newspaper over his head, his Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler crime novels on a nearby table. When I was eight and nine years old, I would pray that he would just
look
at me, turn his lofty head toward me and look at me for two seconds. Decades after he was gone, I would be in Chicago or San Francisco or New York, and a stranger would come up to me and say, “I knew your grandfather.”
    At this hour of the day, the light in the sun room is smooth and thick. From the kitchen, Dorothy inquires about how many people will be staying for dinner. As if the kitchen were always stocked for two dozen guests. Lila walks into the pantry and relays instructions