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baptizing Indians and claiming an endless Louisiane for the kings of France.
    Now the Lakeshore was merely a Montreal suburb where businessmen built comfortable houses, paid yacht club dues, and took the train into the city five days a week. There were Indians in a village on the other side of the golf course, but they kept to themselves.
    Blood and furs, fortune hunting, holy anointing oil, the transportation of faith — all that had been forgotten.
    The Harrisons had no roots in Montreal. Maggie was born on an airbase in Labrador and her parents were from out west. Mrs. Harrison wore turquoise eyeshadow and a matching hair band. Maggie’s father was an Air Canada pilot, flying DC-9s across the Atlantic every week. He drank rye and played golf . According to Maggie, he grew up on a ranch in Alberta, and he walked the fairways with a bowlegged strut.
    Maggie and her parents spoke to each other in language so spare, so cleansed of inflection, Green thought they might as well have transmitted their communications using semaphore flags.
    One afternoon when Green accompanied Maggie home, she left him in the kitchen with her mother, who, without asking if he was hungry, fixed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Mrs. Harrison always fed Green, who was too unsettled in her presence to feel much of an appetite. Maggie reappeared a couple of minutes later carrying a compact vinyl suitcase, the type that was called a train case.
    â€œLet’s go,” she said.
    Green was standing in front of the dishwasher attempting to swallow the sandwich, which was sticking in his throat.
    Mrs. Harrison said, “Where?”
    â€œGreen’s for the weekend.”
    â€œWell. Take care.”
    The next thing Green knew, he and Maggie were out of the house, spinning along Bord-du-Lac Road in her white sports car.
    Green’s real name was Robert Greenaway Metternich. Maggie was the only one who called him Green. The nickname was a joke, of course, but because it was hers exclusively, it had the click of intimacy to it. She used Green all summer, in public, around the yacht club. Green had no pet names for her. Maggie felt private enough, intimate enough.
    Green wondered if anyone knew what they were doing. The unusual thing about their romance was the difference in their ages. Maggie was twenty-one that summer. Green was fourteen.
    His parents occasionally questioned him, but they really had no idea how he spent his days, or what he thought about. There would be long spells with no questions whatsoever, then one morning his father would fire a volley across the breakfast table. “Are you sailing today?” “Did you read the editorial in the Star ?” “Who are your friends at the club?”
    Green did not give out more information than was absolutely required. He tried to emulate Maggie’s laconic interchanges with her parents. The Harrisons’ western Canadian accents were terse. Perhaps the brutal winds that came out of there — the Alberta Clippers — had taught them to shape words closely and to slip them out between barely parted lips, afraid that if they opened wider the cold would penetrate their mouths, freeze their tongues, crack their teeth.
    Maggie’s house and Green’s were three-quarters of a mile apart on Bord-du-Lac Road. Both houses were quiet almost all the time, but Green decided hers was quieter. From just inside the front door he could hear the clock on the electric range ticking, though the kitchen was at the other end of the house. Perhaps the purity of the silence was also a western thing.
    Early one midsummer morning Green was getting dressed in a kind of stupor. Pulling on his shorts very slowly, tying the laces of his sneakers, looking out over the lawn at the silver maples and watching cars go by on Bord-du-Lac Road. He heard the words inside his head, then repeated them aloud. “I am in love with you, Maggie Harrison.” He kept his voice low. He