Due Preparations for the Plague. Janette Turner Hospital

      “He used to have me reciting Homer in Greek at dinner parties when I was six,” Lowell says. “Like a little parrot. His personal performing dwarf. Still, he was less strange to me then than later.”

      “It was like living in parallel universes, he said. All the time. Simultaneously.” Elizabeth sighs and turns the stem of her wineglass in her fingers, clockwise, three revolutions. “I was never sure which one he was in when he was with me.”

      “He was always somewhere else. Even when he was with us, he wasn’t with us. I never really knew him at all.”

      “I didn’t either,” she says.

      “I wanted so much to please him, but he kept on raising the bar. I could never measure up. So of course I chose to measure down. Easier to get his attention.”

      “I had the same problem,” she says. “I could never measure up either.”

      “That’s not true.” Lowell stares at her. “You were the ideal Washington hostess, he told me. Everything my mother wasn’t, he said.”

      “I tried,” she says. “I was sad when you stopped accepting our invitations.”

      “Not your fault,” he assures her.

      “You and I never got a chance to know each other.”

      “No. Well. Nothing to do with you.”

      “So why?”

      “Well, he just made me too nervous. I always felt like I was twelve years old again, not measuring up. And then, Rowena … I mean, my own marriage falling apart. I didn’t want one of his third-degrees.”

      “Your father was sad too. When you stopped coming, I mean.”

      “That’s a laugh. My father couldn’t stand sadness. My mother was sad for years, and it irritated him. It irritated him to have me around.”

      “I think you’re wrong,” she says. “I think he missed you. He was very proud of you.”

      “Oh no, believe me, he was embarrassed by me. He sent me to his own boarding school—”

      “Yes, I know.”

      “—but I blew it. Loser in a school for winners. My father’s name was on all the honor boards, Mather Lowell Hawthorne, gold medal in this, gold medal in that, Latin, Greek, math, physics, athletics, glee club, drama club. Awful. Like a millstone around my neck. Most expensive private school in Massachusetts, and I could always see him thinking sow’s ear when he looked at me.”

      “He kept a photograph of you on the bedroom dresser.”

      “He did?”

      “You’re wearing your school blazer and holding a silver cup.”

      “Oh yeah. That. Cross-country run. Only prize I ever won. Yeah, I’m good at running. Running away’s my specialty. But there you are. The way my father calls it, you win or you lose. He was a winner, I was a loser. Like my mother.”

      “You seem to me very like your father,” she says. “Sharp-minded and courtly and sad.”

      “Courtly! Me?” Lowell laughs. He looks curiously at his reflection in the dark plate glass behind the bar.

      “He could be so gentle,” she says. “It’s not true that he never showed his feelings. He was always sad. Always haunted.”

      “He was haunted,” Lowell agrees. “My mother did that. You know she left him for another man before the … I never forgave her. They were both on that plane.”

      “No, I didn’t know,” she says. “You mean they went down together, your mother and her—?”

      “Not down. You know the details. The hijacking, the explosion.”

      “Hijacking?” she says, leaning forward, avid. “I don’t know details. I hardly know anything. He’d never—He just said she died in an airline disaster.”

      Lowell is stunned. “September ’87,” he says. “Paris to New York, the nerve-gas hijackers—”

      “Oh my God. That hijacking.”

      “Air France Si—I can’t say it. I’m superstitious about the number.”

      “No survivors.” Elizabeth presses her hand against her lips. “Isn’t that right?”

      “Except for the children.”

      “Oh, the children, that’s right, I remember now. I remember seeing those poor little children on TV.”

      “I can’t believe you didn’t know.”

      “No. Nothing. He’d never say a word about the past. I’ve always been curious.”

      “Look,” he says uneasily. “It isn’t something I can talk about.”

      “No, of course not. I’m sorry.” She plays with her wineglass, puddling spilled wine with her finger. She draws an S in the liquid on the low table. “Was the man’s name Sirocco? The man your mother left him for?”

      Lowell frowns. “It was Levinstein. Violinist.”

      “Who was Sirocco?”

      “I have no idea.”

      “He was tormented by Sirocco,” she says. “He used to cry out in his sleep.”

      “My father?”

      “He never mentioned Sirocco to you?”

      “Doesn’t ring any bells. Mafia, maybe? They gathered intelligence on all sorts.”

      “What exactly was Mather’s role?” she wants to know.

      “I never exactly knew. Not precisely. Gathering information and misinformation and deciding which was which, I suppose. He was a spook, and then after the hijacking, when he stopped junketing all over the planet, he trained spooks. That’s all I know. Maybe he still did other stuff too, I really don’t know. He used to say someone has to do the dirty work to keep the country safe. I never got much more detail than that.”

      “Nor did I,” she says.

      “When I was little, he was always flying off to talk to ‘contacts’. He’d never tell us where, but I’d pick up clues, you know. He’d bring back presents and say, Got it in a bazaar in Cairo, or, The wives of the camelmen in Afghanistan make these. Stuff like that.”

      “We never traveled anywhere by plane. He wouldn’t let me fly alone either.”

      “Planes spooked him after ’87. Plus I think, you know, he was pushed into semi-retirement. I think they were afraid he was losing it. Kept him in Washington.”

      “There used to be a car and a driver,” she says. “Every day. And then suddenly, no more official limo, and he had to use his own car. Mostly he shut himself up in his study with his computer and his books.”

      “They put him out to pasture,” Lowell says. “Short life span in Intelligence, he always said that.”

      “It gnawed at him,” she says. “It wasn’t just the nightmares. Sometimes he would disappear all night. Just driving round the city, I think.”

      Lowell stares at her.

      “I could tell from the mileage,” she says. “I’d check the odometer. He could put in fifty, sixty miles in a night.”

      “I told you he was a stranger to me. I knew the mailman better.”

      “There was no one I could ask about it,” she says. “Everything’s classified, or else that was his excuse.”

      “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” Lowell says. “I know the routine.”