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the
Appassionata
moved up and down the octaves, great spaces built around me, as though days, weeks, evenyears had passed. Inside those spaces, my rage could rise and recede, leaving me stumped at how a vigilant daughter of the sixties could be accused by her fourteen-year-old son of social and political indifference.
    I listened to Beethoven so many times that there were moments in the tape that garbled, went underwater. The music drowned. I listened driving to and from school, or driving around at night looking for Stephen, watching a weak sun rise over the abandoned train yards as Beethoven went crazy.
    Beethoven. Public Enemy. I'm lying in bed imagining Dante looking through the language as through the wide-angle lens of a camera, framing, over the full range of the octaves, a dark place, a lake of ice unremittingly cruel.
    It
must
be ice and not stone, not just because of the killing sensation of cold, but because of a fundamental belief humans hold in regard to ice. Ice cracks, it breaks up and thaws eventually.
    No, says Dante. Not this ice:
    Nonfece al corso suo si grosso velo

di verno la Daniola in Osterlic,

ne Tanal la sotto ilfreddo cielo,

com ‘era quivi; che se Tambernic

vi fosse su caduto, o Pietrapana,

non avria pur dall'orlo fatto eric…
    But even places on earth that have been frozen for thousands of years thaw finally, shift and thaw to reveal ancient surprises, mastodons, woolly mammoths. My oldestbrother has a mastodon's tusk that I have seen and touched. I've petted the coarse hair above the ivory.
    Ice cracks. It melts and offers, whole and preserved, sailors buried in permafrost along the Arctic islands. The flesh on their bodies is startling, intimate. The Arctic anthropologists are awed, silenced by their finds, by the sad flesh preserved, gifts of the ice.
    During the autopsies performed by the doctors who have set up tents on the gray stony tundra in Arctic summer—the place so flat, so vast, one cannot tell where the earth ends and the sky begins—the exhumed's perfect, one-hundred-fifty-year-old faces are napkin-covered, as if to shield them from their own undoing.
    Some of the sailors’ descendants have been allowed to come along. Outside the tent, they finger the buttons on the jackets of their dead, the jackets and trousers and shoes that have been laid out in the Midnight Sun in the shapes of the men who wore them.
    The buttons on the jackets are silver. One descendant asks, may he keep one? He's aware of a change in himself. He weeps without embarrassment before the camera. He says that to look into the face of his relative is to see his own, and his children.
    Well, fine,
Dante leers up at me a long watery grin through the ages.
That's “sweet.” But the
ice
in Caina, Antenora? This ice will never, ever eric…
    I can translate about three lines of the canto at a time before I must take a break, slipping carefully down under the covers so as not to knock dictionaries, drafts, my copy of the
Inferno
from the bed.
    Dozing, waking to translate a few more lines, I begin totire of Dante, his unequivocal ice, his righteousness, the way he goes carelessly over the lake kicking the heads riveted there.
    No wonder they snarl at him.
Fuck him,
I think, and laugh at myself for the first time in weeks. I say it aloud. “Fuck Dante and his fucking
Inferno.”
    My voice rings through the empty rooms.
    During the last year with Stephen I'm afraid I have joined him in his foul mouth. It's something Stan has come to hate about me. Certainly, before all the trouble, I was a reasonable, benevolently manipulative post-sixties mom suggesting to my children that they “save the four-letter words for appropriate occasions. Otherwise,” I'd coo, “they lose their power.”
    In the event that one or the other's judgments regarding “appropriate occasions” faltered, the boys were fined a nickel for the initial offense, a dime for the next, and so on, a sort of monetary Richter scale approach to the