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“It’s a glamorous house.” He saw my father’s nostrils flicker at that adjective—as we were meant to see. “Besides,” my brother said, “there’s nobody ever around here.”
    I wondered which of those statements my father, in his lawyerish, partitioning way, would choose to answer.
    He smiled. “Ah well, you were always her favorite son.”
    My brother grinned at him. “She can keep calling Watanabe ‘Knobby.’”
    When he had gone up the stairs, my father leaned forward. “My mother doesn’t get any less dotty. She’s now wanting me to—sue people.”
    “Sue?” my mother said faintly. “Who?”
    That never got answered, or not then. From the top of the stairs my brother yelled: “No dottier than us.”
    Next morning, though, before they left, out on the front steps where we had always exchanged our information about ourselves, my brother told me. “Grandmother wants him to sue Craig Towle. Oh, not for what you think.”
    It had been absurd of me—and of my mother, to pretend, as we often did, that my brother was only tagging along. “Not for money?” No one in the know ever gave my grandmother investment advice. “What then?”
    “She claims he sucked her life blood.”
    “She is crazy, then?”
    “No,” he said. “He sort of did.”
    The long old car came for them then, Watanabe—Knobby, at the wheel. Coming for both him and my father, and their goods.
    Yet that evening before, I think my father hadn’t yet decided on his new life. Or on which of his former ones he would resume. Of course, there were matters we didn’t know of yet—to do with money—that he knew would shortly fall on us, and obliquely on him. As well as some matters he hoped we would never know? I’m not sure of that. I think that in the end we hope our children will know everything about us. It helps the burden, on both sides. I look at my own and think—yes, everything.
    Once we were sure my brother had packed off to his room, my father turned to me; he always divided us so. “You’ve grown very handsome.” His eyes traveled my length. “Rio would be astounded.”
    “Oh no you don’t,” my mother said. “One of us out there is enough.”
    “No,” he said, “I won’t. Do that. That market is off anyway, maybe. And my taste for it.”
    We knew all about this, our bread and butter depending on it. He was a good lawyer but could never settle on one branch of the law, as the sensibly ambitious did. Something at the core of him kept confusing his markets with his tastes. After all, he was only finally home, after so long away, because a lady had died.
    We had had early supper, the town custom, and fine for those who had bridge games or civic meetings to keep, but here we three now were, in silence, and fed, the high pre-spring evening descending. We were not a family whom the gloaming brought together; dusk expelled us to our own haunts. But I now had no girlfriend; no boyfriend either. At this hour, Bill Wetmore, who in my memory continued to spoil all successors, was very possibly in bed, in a hayloft if Dartmouth had them, expounding on his Beaux Arts relative to some other girl. For seventeeners, the resources of a town like ours sometimes viciously contract. If I had still been a bobby-soxer—in the true meaning of the word, not my father’s contemptuous use of it—I might have been packed off upstairs too, but that was long ago, more than a year. Now they did not want me to leave them. In the last deep blue light invading our dining room, which had a deep bay, I could glimpse the still frozen garden between us and the Evamses’, every leaf craw and leftover stalk straining to become part of the wind. I had never felt so close to my parents as a couple. It was the “exquisite hour.” I had learned that French phrase for it in one of my mother’s books—yet none of it was for us.
    Something had to be said, but not just anything. Any light remark would be seized and torn. My mother said, “Is