"Sacrifice something," she said.

I had never thought of it that way, never sensed, other than inchoately, that I wished to be called to any greater purpose than the lowly office I maintained. And yet it was true. She had seen it, the fact that for all my professional dispa.s.sion, I longed for something fierce and n.o.ble, something for which I would put everything at risk.

"You're right," I said to her.

Billy gazed at me, amazed. "Really? I never knew you felt that way." He turned to Dora. "I think you know Cal better than I do."

Dora's eyes remained on mine. "Yes, I think I do," she said.

She added nothing else, and the conversation quickly moved on to other things. And yet, for the rest of the evening, I felt curiously vulnerable and exposed, like a small animal s.n.a.t.c.hed from the undergrowth, the predator's black talons already sinking in.

After dinner, we gathered around the fire. Dora and Billy sat together on the brocade sofa my father had bought some years before. It had a mahogany frame and was covered in a wine-red velvet, a taste for the luxurious he felt entirely free to indulge, buying silver and crystal, expensive furniture and a large Oriental carpet, all of it designed to give him a sense that he was, at last, the lord of a great estate. For Dora's sake, he commented expansively upon almost every article in the room, from the tinkling chandelier to the old grandfather clock that ticked loudly in the corner.

I could hardly imagine a more boring recitation, but through it all, Dora showed a peculiarly intense interest in even the most ba.n.a.l aspects of my father's conversation, how things were made, for example, where they came from. Even his travels, limited as they were, engaged her, his recent sojourn in Virginia as wondrous as one of Sinbad's voyages.

As for Dora herself, she spoke almost exclusively about books, presenting fictional characters, even the most minor ones, as if they were real, the shopkeepers and seamstresses in Balzac, the milling throng in d.i.c.kens. But of the caravan of actual individuals anyone of her age should have encountered in real life by then, she had almost nothing to say.

The evening came to a close at just before eleven. At the door my father took Dora's hand. "It was a pleasure, my dear," he said as he kissed it ceremoniously. "I hope you come again."

"Thank you," she said, smiling up at him. "So do I."

With that she turned and headed down the walkway, Billy at her side. I saw him take her arm as they neared the stairs at the end of it.

"Charming girl," my father murmured as we stood together and watched them go, two figures moving through the dense fog to where my brother's car rested like a pile of rusty sc.r.a.p at the bottom of the stairs. "Quite charming, don't you think? And lovely."

I tossed what remained of my cigar into the yard. "Charming and lovely, yes."

"Billy's quite taken with her."

"By all indications."

My father smiled. "His mother must be pleased. She's always expected such a woman to turn up."

I shrugged. "And now, at last, she has."

"It's an illusion, of course," my father said. "But there's a sweetness to it." A curious wistfulness settled over him. "And who knows, Cal. Maybe Dora is the woman who was born to love Billy all his days."

A different possibility flashed into my mind like the glint of a knife. "Or born to break his heart," I said.

Chapter Fourteen.

For the next few weeks, I watched Dora from a distance. Each time I visited the Sentinel, I found her working at her desk. She never greeted me with more than a quick nod. On other occasions, when I ran into her in a local store, she would say only "h.e.l.lo, Cal" and go on with her shopping. Sometimes, I noticed her striding alone by the seawall, her eyes on the bay, MacAndrews Island, the charred remains of the Phelps mansion that lay atop it, its blackened chimneys rising like gun barrels against the overarching sky. Plotting her next move, I thought.

As for Billy, he now lived in the full radiance of romantic antic.i.p.ation. So much so that one warm Sat.u.r.day afternoon in early May, as we played a game of croquet on my front lawn, he even ventured the hope that I might find such happiness too.

"Happiness," I said. I gave one of the wooden b.a.l.l.s a hollow bang. "So you're happy now?"

"Yes, I am," Billy said.

"You're happy with Dora?"

"I'm happy because of Dora."

"And you've learned a lot about her, I suppose?"

Billy paced from one ball to another, then knelt down, eyeing the angle of his shot. "Enough."

"Enough for what?" I asked absently.

Billy got to his feet, slapping bits of gra.s.s from his trousers. Instead of answering me, he said, "I was thinking of dropping by Mother's cottage later this afternoon. Take a walk along Fox Creek. Would you like to come along? With Dora and me, I mean."

A warning sounded suddenly at this suggestion, like the snapping of a twig behind me in the dark, but I said nothing.

Billy made a grand swing. The ball shot forward, swept beneath a metal goal. He crowed with pleasure. "I want Dora to see the cottage. Get some sense of what Mother was like before the stroke. How vibrant she was."

"Well, for G.o.d's sake, don't tell her what happened."

"What do you mean?"

"The way she was when I found her."

"Why not?"

"Because she was so ... she looked so..."

"She looked human, Cal." He saw that all talk of the horrible condition in which I'd found our mother still disturbed me, and shrugged. "Anyway, Dora and I plan to go out to the cottage later this afternoon. I thought you might want to join us. We wouldn't stay for very long. I know you need to ... I mean, it being Sat.u.r.day, I know you have things to do in Royston."

He meant that I could linger on Fox Creek for only a little while before heading for my weekly rendezvous with my wh.o.r.e.

"I really would like you to come along, Cal," he added emphatically. "We don't get together as often as we used to. And besides, I'd like you to get to know Dora better. Come on, Cal, join us."

There was no way to refuse the brightness of his smile, the innocence of his offer. For a moment, he was a young boy again, urging me to help him take his homemade raft to Fox Creek. And so I agreed.

I got to Fox Creek a few minutes before the appointed time. The little house in which my mother had chosen to spend her final years stood nestled in a grove of evergreen. I could imagine her sitting on its small porch, humming a sc.r.a.p of Mozart, a book of poetry in her lap. The Great Example in the fullness of her solitude. I thought of how often I'd worked to please her, to shine somehow in her eyes, perhaps prove that what I lacked in pa.s.sion I made up for in reason, that she and Billy could survive and flourish only in a world that men like my father and me, cool-headed and realistic, had made safe for dreamers. And yet, for all my effort, I knew that I'd never gained any portion of the sweet regard she'd so generously heaped upon my brother, never felt in me the deep delight she took in him.

Some aspect of this dark truth was probably in my face when Billy and Dora arrived, though my brother was too much in love by then to allow anything to dampen his own exultant mood. I could see it in the lightness of his stride as he came toward me. In finding Dora, Billy seemed to believe that he'd grasped something amazing, that rare form of love that flowers ever more beautifully as beauty fades, endures every shock and sorrow, the green vine of his romance already aging toward a ruby richness, his love, at last, like wine.

"Wonderful day, isn't it, Cal?" He was dressed in linen trousers and an open-collared white shirt, his head topped with a rumpled felt hat, a figure truly splendid, very nearly radiant.

"Yes, it is," I said, my eyes moving reflexively to Dora.

She stood beside him in a long-sleeved dress with slightly puffed shoulders. Like all her attire, it seemed selected for the maximum of coverage.

"h.e.l.lo, Cal." She glanced about, taking the general lay of the area, her eyes following a line of purple crocuses that had just sprouted along the edge of the creek. "What a lovely place."

Billy pointed toward the cottage. "We've kept it as a memorial to our mother," he said to Dora. "All her things are still there."

"Most of them," I said, referring to the fact that Billy was continually taking some little token from it, a napkin or a bud vase. "I guess you know by now that my brother calls her The Great Example."

"Which she is," Billy said quite seriously.

With that, he led us across the lawn, mounted the wooden stairs, and opened the door of the house in which I'd found my mother in her helpless sprawl. It was a vision that met me at the threshold, so that I suddenly recoiled and stepped back onto the porch, leaving my brother and Dora to explore the cottage.

From my place just outside the door, I watched as the two of them drifted slowly about the cottage, Billy occasionally lifting some curio my mother had acc.u.mulated. I noticed Dora move her finger along the side of the little desk by the window. She seemed to be gathering something from it, my mother's thoughts and memories, as if such things lay like a film of dust upon the objects we left behind.

As the minutes pa.s.sed, Billy grew increasingly expansive, spinning tales of The Great Example, utterly unmindful that I remained outside, still shaken by the memory of my mother's lying faceup, those yellow stains, the smell, the filth, the horrible indignity of it all. He walked into another room, leaving Dora behind just long enough for her to glance in my direction, glimpse the seething in my eyes. In a single fluid movement, seamless as a breeze, she swept over to me, touched my arm, then whispered, "What's the matter, Cal?"

"The way she looked when I found her," I said. "Why can't I get it out of my head?"

"Because you love her."

"So does Billy, but--" I stopped, still unable to speak the truth.

Dora waited.

And it came.

"But she loves him back," I said. "Sometimes I think she even taught him how to love. You know, with all his heart."

"What did she teach you?"

I smiled thinly. "The opposite lesson, I suppose."

"Which was?"

"How to live without it."

I expected Dora to offer some small commiseration, perhaps a counterargument of some kind. But instead of a well-intentioned, ba.n.a.l aside, the words dropped from her mouth like shards of ice. "There are worse lessons than living without love."

"Do you think so?"

She started to answer, but at that moment Billy sailed onto the porch and grabbed her hand. "Let's walk over to the bridge," he urged.

It was only a short walk to the bridge, my mother's cottage still clearly visible behind us. Some of the bulbs my mother had planted here and there were beginning to inch their way into the spring air, scattering sparks of red and gold across our path.

"This is where my father proposed to my mother," Billy told Dora as he led her to the center of the bridge, a rickety, unstable old thing that shook slightly as they walked onto it. When they reached the center, he let go of Dora's hand, leaned over the wooden rail, stared into the rapid water below. "I made a raft once. Tried to sail all the way across." He looked up and grinned at me. "Remember, Cal?"

"I remember that you saved a little girl's life instead," I said, recalling the gleam and glory of his dive. "Have you told Dora about that?"

"No," Dora said. "He hasn't."

Billy smiled. "We did it together," he told her. "Cal and I."

"You're the one who plunged in after her," I reminded him.

He gazed at me affectionately. "But you're the one who plunged in after me."

With that, he seized Dora's hand again, tugging her off the bridge and along the water's edge.

"I still sometimes wonder what Mother thought about," Billy said once we'd reached the spot where she had spent long hours, reading silently on a small red blanket.

"The past," I said.

He looked at me quizzically. "Why not the future?"

"She didn't have a future by then."

"Of course she did," Billy replied. "She'd left Dad. She'd chosen to live her own life. Her future was completely open."

"No future is ever open," I said bleakly.

Billy shook his head and laughed. "You are a dark force, Cal. You are truly a dark force. Isn't he, Dora?"

She kept her eyes on the water. "Yes."

We sat down beside the water, Billy and Dora close together, I apart, my back pressed against a tree.

Seeing them so close, my brother's arm at Dora's waist, filled me with a strange unease, a restlessness that finally drove me away from them, where I stood alone, smoking idly, now eager to be on my way to Royston, the sweet oblivion of a brothel bed.

"I want to get something from the cottage," Billy said suddenly. He hastily got to his feet. "I'll meet you two at the car."

With that he bounded off toward the cottage, leaving Dora and me beside the water. I scooped up a small stone and plopped it into the creek. When I glanced back toward the cottage, Billy was coming out of it, carrying a small blue vase.

"He keeps taking things from the house," I said. "Pieces of her."

Dora looked at me pointedly. "Be careful, Cal," she said.

"Of what?"

"Of needing love too much."

I laughed. "I think it's my brother who has that problem."

Her eyes were very still. "No," she said. "It's you."

No one had ever spoken to me with such disturbing intimacy, and all during the drive to Royston that evening, I replayed the moment, the stillness in Dora's eyes, the way she'd said "It's you" with such certainty that it was me, rather than my brother, who was perilously in need of love.

I was still brooding on what she'd said when I arrived on Blyden Street at just after six. Night had fallen, the lights of the town shimmering on the water. I could hear the piano in the bar next door, the steady hum of the crowd inside.

Maggie Flynn sat on the porch as I came up the steps, fanning herself languidly in the warm night air. She'd pulled her dress up, and her large round knees shone like pale orbs as she drifted back and forth in the old wooden swing.

"I'd just about given up on you, Cal," she said.