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wife.
    “You should get out with people more,” says the socially minded Mrs. Boyle. “Stop fussing around with all those poisonous paints. You only keep starting over again anyway. If you sawpeople once in a while, maybe you wouldn’t make so many mistakes. Maybe you’d actually finish one of those pictures.”
    Pictures. Mistakes.
    As I said, I take nothing from the world now.

A ll the water in this city runs urgently towards the north, hurries towards the Great Lake with the name of a Canadian province. The city itself, however, looks east and west from the two sides of the Genesee River, as if its citizens had one day decided to curl inward rather than admit to the existence of another land, an opposite shore with rivers and farms and cities of its own.
    The country across the lake never really takes shape in the collective imagination here. Cold, distant, separated by enough water that the curve of the earth makes it invisible, the far shore disappears swiftly from the memory — despite excursions, or even complete summer vacations there — as quickly as a trip to an amusement park might, after daily life is resumed. The impression left behind is as vague and fleeting as the various intensities of light over the lake, which change before they fully register in the mind, before anyone with watercolours and a brush is able to capture them on the paper in his hand.
    I was seventeen in 1912, when my father made enough money on Canadian mining stocks to begin to take more seriously the country that the lake concealed. An acquaintance, a section manager at the Eastman factory, had persuaded him to invest in a property north of Lake Superior, and, unlikely as this may seem, his money doubled and then tripled. My silent, sober father, much, I think, to his own amazement, proved to have financial talent. He had not remarried. For a time after my mother’s death he had no social life to speak of, and was therefore able to spend his evenings poring over his accounts and stock-market quotations — his own special game of solitaire. Often at night I would fall asleep listening to him add sums aloud as he sorted papers filled with numbers, papers which themselves made a comforting sound when he moved them, like a soft breeze in a grove of maples.
    Ours was a tidy, ordered, and not unhappy existence. The interior of the house seemed to have physically changed with my mother’s absence, the warm, sometimes claustrophobic quality I associated with my early childhood having departed with her, even though not a single piece of furniture, not a curtain, not a doily had been changed or removed since her death. My father and I moved in our separate predictable orbits, and trusted the regularity of each other’s habits. He did not inspect me as my mother had each day before I left for school, and rarely commented on my behaviour or my achievements. He would scan my school reports in the most cursory of ways, was neither pleasantly surprised when I was at the head of the class nor greatly disturbed if my grades began to falter. He did not, yousee, insist upon relationship. Emotion was almost entirely absent from the contact we had with each other — which is not to say that he was unkind to me or that we had no feelings for each other. I, in turn, was comfortable with his lack of intrusion. It seemed to me that the rooms we lived in had become spacious, that light and wind entered easily through the windows. Occasionally sounds reached us from the outside, from the real world. My father liked birds, I remember, was glad if an unusual species appeared in our yard; a Baltimore oriole, for instance. Sometimes we talked about things like that.
    Immediately after my mother’s death, my father moved out of the bedroom they had shared, slept instead in a small, cell-like room at the far end of the hall. I had always believed that the large bedroom was my mother’s place anyway — her dressing table, her wardrobe full of long,