The coughing at least gives me leisure to study him, more closely than I ever have before. That patriarchal beard-that's the beard Moses came down from the mountain with, isn't it? That tall, tottering frame: a Doric column ever on the verge of toppling. Whatever was straight in him is now bent. He's all angles, like an attic.

"Are you all right, Monsieur?"

He puts out a hand to allay my concern. With the other, he pounds his chest until the air begins once more to stream.

"Nothing to . . ." One last cough. "Nothing to worry about, just a bit of-salivation, I think, going down the-the wrong aqueduct."

"Can I help you with anything?"

"Me? Oh, no no no. You see, I couldn't help but-hear you. You and your mother, I mean. . . ."

He does something startling then. He touches me. A scaly, salty hand, pressed against my shoulder.

"See here, my boy, you really ought to look kindly on her. It's been a hard road, hasn't it? Ah, but if it's your father you're wanting to hear about, there are plenty of other people to ask."

This look he's giving me . . . it's the same look he gave me the other night over the dining table. That helpless complicity, oddly soothing when it first came my way. Here, after all, was Father Time. Old friend of my father's.

Attendant at my father's funeral.

"Of course," I hear myself say. "Of course." I peer into the slowopening crypt of his face. "You mean I could just-ask you questions about my father? His past, I mean?"

"Oh my, yes," he says, smiling. "It's one thing we're good for, old vanes like me. You can always get us to point back, eh? The further back the better. Why, if you asked me what we had for dinner tonight, I'm afraid I couldn't tell you. Whiting, perhaps."

"Chicken."

"Ah, you see? Gone. Utterly. Now ask me how I dined the day Mirabeau died, I can tell you. Down to the last drop of cassis, yes."

His eyes go rheumy with memory. His hand clenches and unclenches.

"I know it's getting late," I say. "But would you mind terribly if we . . . ?"

"Mind?" His features swarm with confusion. "Ah, you'd like to- you mean now, is that it? Well, I suppose that might work. Yes, we could-we could even retire upstairs to my quarters if you . . . do you know, I might have some cocoa first. Things f low better, don't they, with a little chocolate?"

"Monsieur," I say, raising a hand. "Before we say another word, I must beg you to tell me. Did my father ever have cause to meet a prince ? "

"Why, yes," he answers. "Yes, of course. Everyone was a prince in those days."

CHAPTE R 1 4.

Treasures of a Reliquary "You m us t e xcuse the . . . so seldom get visitors up here . . . not much in the way of a chair . . ."

Father Time, my new friend, sputters his apologies as he prods open the balky door.

And it's true, when a man ceases to pay his rent, no one comes any longer to sweep his f loors. The dust that adheres as a matter of course to Father Time's belongings has become, over the past few months, a damp, brownish rime that leaves translucent slicks on the f loorboards and on the patches of plaster that show wherever the f lower-speckled wallpaper has pulled away.

The curtains are gone. There's an old rosewood dresser with twisted-copper drawer handles. An old washstand with a wooden top. No trace of a fire in the fireplace-how he must have shivered-and scant trace of the room this used to be. For when I was a child, it was my father's workshop, and every bit as forbiddingly private as he was.

Standing now amid the old detritus, I'm stabbed by the memory of him: stooped over his lathe, grinding out lenses for spectacles, telescopes, microscopes. I remember the smell of the turpentine and the

melted pitch and the copper nitrate. I remember stepping on the old

cartridge shells he used for cutting glass-they lay in the hallway like

sprung traps.

My mother used to reprove him for the mess he left behind-the

mounts, the brass tubes and spindles, centrifugally whirled in every

direction. Beneath all her complaints lay the suggestion that a physician might have found a more suitable second career. To which he had

but one reply:

"It was good enough for Spinoza."

All of that's gone now, even the smell. All except for Father's desk,