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  Until their divorce, Larry and Myra took their children every Memorial Day and Labor Day to the Willow house—trips, Adam would later learn, that were largely bolstered by his mother’s admiration of his grandfather’s vision, a sentiment which earned her a permanent place in Max’s circle of deepest affection.

  2

  At the beginning of July, Larry calls Caro to tell her that he and Betty, his third wife, will be spending the first two weeks of August at Max’s Folly, the name they have all taken to calling the house now that Max is gone. Since Ida’s death, Larry and his brother, Henry, have rented the house to two sculptors. The lease will run out at the end of the month, and Larry and Henry intend to put the house up for sale after Labor Day. During Larry’s trip, he will arrange for some painting and minor repairs to be done. Would Caro like to come for a visit with Adam, Rachida, and Omar? Not wanting to sound morbid, Caro thinks, her father refrains from saying final visit, though this is obviously the case.

  “Actually, if you don’t mind having the workers around, you could stay until Labor Day. I’m having the pool liner replaced next week, and the Ping-Pong table is still set up in the dining room.”

  “Did you ask Adam?”

  Her father clears his throat. The tension between her brother and father has only increased with the addition of Rachida to the family. What kind of hypocritical bullshit is that? Adam sputtered when her father responded to the news of his plan to marry Rachida by asking if their children would be American or Moroccan. All my life you lecture me on the importance of marrying a Jewish woman. Not that you’ve seemed to think, since Mom, that it applied to you. What you really meant was have your babies with a white Jewish woman. Only the Ashkenazi need apply.

  Adam’s comments, Caro knows, had cut her father to the quick. Her father thinks of himself as a reasonable man, an enlightened person, a man with his feet firmly planted in science but with a healthy respect for his heritage and the history of his people. In his mind, his feelings are utterly distinct from racial prejudice, even if he cannot articulate exactly how when Adam accuses him of precisely this.

  “Well, I was hoping you could do that. You know Adam. If I ask, he’ll say no. Think it over, okay? I’ve got to run.”

  Caro remains holding the phone, filled with the sort of uncomfortable feelings that make her want to put something in her mouth, which, in fact, she does: the rest of a box of cereal followed by the remaining third of a jar of peanut butter. By the time she reaches the jar bottom, she is too sedated and filled with disgust at her lack of self-control to think about her brother.

  Adam’s response when Caro calls the following evening to convey their father’s offer comes as a surprise. “Sure. That would be great. Omar’s camp will be over early August. We can go for a week while Dad’s there and then stay for another week after that. I’ll bring Eva so she can watch Omar and I can get some work done. Rachida can come up on the weekends.”

  “What do you mean we? I wasn’t thinking of staying after Dad leaves.”

  When Adam speaks again, it is in the voice Caro has known since childhood: the boy who, having understood that he was too old to get into bed with their mother after a bad dream, would creep downstairs to climb in with her, the trellising details of the dream described while she tried to make herself comfortable in half of a twin bed. “Come on, Caro, your school’s closed in August. You know I can’t go without you.”

  3

  With Larry’s move to Arizona, Caro and Adam’s Memorial Day and Labor Day visits to Max’s Tali came to a halt. Instead, each August their father would travel east and they would take a two-week vacation with him, the destinations limited by Adam’s plane phobia to locales reachable by car or train, with a few days first at the Willow house. By then, with the help of abundant chemical sealants and an expert who’d succeeded in removing the geese from the property by placing poison in the pond, Max had managed to hold his own against nature’s attack on the property, and Ida, won over by the presence of her grandchildren, begrudgingly agreed to summer visits. Max built a swimming pool with a black rubber liner safe from cracks in the winter at the cost of making the water ominously opaque and installed a Ping-Pong table in the dining room, where they held nightly round-robin doubles tournaments, the pairings—plump Ida and clumsy Adam, tanned Larry and bespectacled Max—amusingly reported by Caro in her nightly calls home to her mother.

  Adam can no longer recall when they ceased the August visits to Willow. It must have been, he thinks, when his father finally threw in the towel on those summer trips, all of which involved endless car drives during which Adam would try to mitigate the boredom by reading in the backseat, resulting in a car sickness whose progression could be measured in the accelerating yellow cast to his skin. Having arrived at their destination, a mountain or lake or beach cottage somewhere, Adam would stay inside with his nose in a book, a choice that yielded the satisfaction of substantially pissing off his father.

  It was on one of those occasions that he discovered the story of Wright’s original Taliesin home. He’d run out of reading material before they left Willow and borrowed a book about Wright from his grandfather’s bookcase for the trip, which that year was to a cottage on Prince Edward Island that bordered the St. Lawrence Sound. His father and Caro had just come in from an afternoon at an empty, duned beach, an excursion which his father had first attempted to cajole him to join, then threatened punishment if he did not, before reaching a final peevish “Suit yourself, your loss, not ours.”

  Larry was on the back patio shaking the sand out of the towels and tote bags when Adam, whose late pubescence had left him beached in a place neither child nor man, swung open the screen door.

  “Did you know that the original Taliesin burned to the ground?”

  “No, I never heard that.” Larry sat down on the picnic bench and began working on a recalcitrant sandal strap.

  “Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright’s mistress”—Adam could not hide the pleasure in being able to use this last word—“and two of her children and three other people were ax-murdered.”

  “Really.”

  Adam was dancing from foot to foot, approaching a state when he would get so excited his voice would crack, his father yelling, “Jesus Christ, calm the fuck down,” and Adam shouting, “Look at you, look at you, fuck fuck fuck…” before he stormed out—which here would entail climbing down the red clay cliffs to the water’s edge, where, knobby-kneed and weak-ankled, he might slip on the rocks and, Adam’s imagination jumping ahead, flail in the crashing waves.

  “Ax-murdered,” Adam repeated in a mock spooky voice.

  Larry sat up, a sandal in each hand. “What are you talking about?”

  “The servant from Barbados doused the dining room with gasoline, sealed off all the doors but one, lit a match, and then stood at the remaining door axing everyone as they came out.”

  Adam sank down on his haunches and swung an imaginary ax through the damp hot air. His father stared at him with a look of disgust, as though he were holding back from saying something along the lines of Don’t you think you’re a little old for this sort of stuff? At your age, I was sneaking Playboy magazines under my bed.

  “So, how did Frank Lloyd Wright survive this carnage?” Larry asked.

  “He wasn’t there.” Although Adam had not intended for there to be an analogy drawn to his absent father, recognizing the potential, he lingered on the last syllable and then, without a backward glance, picked up his book and returned inside.

  Since then, Adam has read different versions of the first Taliesin fire. (The house was rebuilt and then caught fire again.) In some accounts, the culprit was, as he’d originally read, a man from Barbados. In others, he was a recently fired servant enraged by his dismissal; a manservant abusively treated by Wright’s lover, Mamah Cheney; a cook driven mad by the immorality of Wright and Cheney, both of whom had left their spouses and children to travel together to Europe, living openly together without so much as a hint
of shame. Hussy, Mamah would hear the cook mumbling as he diced apples for cobbler and onions for pork stuffing. In some versions, all egresses from the Wright dining room were sealed. In others, certain members of Wright’s studio escaped through the casement windows. In all of them, it was the fire in the luncheon room that sent the victims into the arms of the man with the ax.

  4

  They leave at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, Eva and Omar in the backseat with the cooler Myra has filled with cold drinks and snacks, Adam in the passenger seat, Caro behind the wheel. Rachida is on call for the weekend, her goodbyes whispered to Adam and Omar while they were still half-asleep. Myra stands on the street watching the last-minute loading of bags and buckling of seat belts.

  For the past week, Caro has tried to convince her mother to come up the following Saturday with Rachida, by which time her father and Betty will have left.

  “Thank you, darling. It’s sweet of you to invite me, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

  “I’d tell Dad. I’m sure he’d have no problem with your staying with us.”

  “It’s not him. It’s me. You know that I don’t enjoy nostalgia trips. I’ve never even gone back to see my parents’ house in Baltimore.”

  By the time they reach the thruway, Omar and Eva have both fallen asleep. Adam opens his window and closes his eyes.

  It’s five when they arrive at the Willow house. Larry comes out to the driveway in time to see his daughter drive up with three inert bodies. “I’m glad everyone’s so excited to be here.”

  Adam opens the car door, stumbles toward the bushes, leans over the blue hydrangeas, and throws up.

  “Jesus,” Larry calls out. “Are you all right?”

  Adam picks up his glasses, which have fallen onto the gravel. He wipes his mouth on the back of his arm, points at the house, and heads inside.

  Caro shakes Eva and Omar awake. When she turns around, Betty is there, barefoot in micro white shorts that hug her broad bottom and show off her long, tanned legs. Betty pinches her nose. “What is that foul smell?”

  Caro kisses Betty on the cheek. “Adam puked in the bushes.”

  Omar climbs out of the car and hugs his grandfather. Eva stands with the coolor pressed against her middle, looking around.

  “Betty, Dad—this is Eva. Eva—this is my father, Larry, and Betty. Wow, it is nasty smelling…”

  “I’ll get the hose.” Betty blows kisses at everyone, then heads to the side of the house. Larry takes the cooler from Eva.

  “It is so beautiful here,” Eva says. “I never see anything like this except in The Sound of Music. At the beginning, where Maria sings.”

  “It’s the Catskills, not the Alps,” Larry says. “But it is pretty.”

  Betty drags the hose over to the bushes and begins spraying them. The kitchen door bangs and Adam reappears, clammy and pale. “I should do that,” he says.

  “I got it, lovey. Remember, I grew up on a ranch in New Zealand. This is nothing next to what the dogs would drag home. Chewed-up rabbits and worse.”

  “Go,” Caro directs, “rest by the pool. I’ll unload the car.”

  “Turn off the stove,” Betty hollers. “Swedish meatballs should be done.”

  Caro and Larry carry the bags inside, the bedroom arrangements having been worked out over the phone: Adam in the guest room with the queen bed, so there will be space for Rachida when she comes, Eva and Omar in the bunk beds in what Grandma Ida had called the children’s room, Caro on the couch in the den until her father and Betty leave, when she will move into what had been her grandparents’ room.

  Caro pulls on her black tank suit, covering up her excesses with an oversized T-shirt. Most of the time, she feels at peace that she is never going to be anyone to look at, her brief foray with having a sexy figure the year she lived abroad having borne nothing worthwhile. Given one wish, it would not be to have that body again but, rather, to eat normally: three meals a day and a snack here and there. Around her father, though, she is always thrown back into the feeling she has had since her solid child’s body morphed into something with bulges in the right, but also in too many of the wrong, places—that she has disappointed him by not being a beauty.

  She climbs the flagstone steps to the pool, where Eva and Omar are already in the water, squealing as they take turns throwing a basketball into a floating hoop left by the tenants. Eva has on a tomato-red bathing suit with an attached skirt and a stiff built-in brassiere, absurdly large on her, a hand-me-down, perhaps, from Ursula or Alicia.

  Her father and Betty are seated under an umbrella with drinks in their hands. Adam is sprawled on a chaise at the edge of the pool with his eyes closed.

  “Miss Caro, Miss Caro!” Eva waves.

  “You found your suits.”

  “Dr. M. tell me to pack them on top of the suitcases so Omar can swim right away. Omar show me the way Mr. Adam used to go to the pool. Through the window!”

  Caro had forgotten this, that Adam would leave the screen propped against the bedroom wall so he could come and go through the window.

  Betty pours Caro a drink that looks like a melted lollipop. “Have a meatball,” she says, pointing at the platter. “Nice, isn’t it? I like seeing the mountains. And it’s so cool compared to Arizona. You can’t even be outside in August there.”

  Betty flings her legs up so that her bunioned but well-manicured feet rest on Larry’s thighs. Caro feels her jaw tighten as she recalls her last visit to Tucson, when an evening had similarly commenced with a pitcher of something too sweet and had then proceeded to Betty pressing her pelvis against her father and calling him her baby cucumber.

  “I have to admit, for the first time, this visit, I understand why my father loved it here.”

  Adam opens his eyes.

  “Where did you say Eva’s from?” Betty asks Adam. “She seems like a sweet girl.”

  “Iquitos. That’s a city on the Amazon in northern Peru.”

  “I didn’t know the Amazon went through Peru. Geography.” Betty laughs. “Well, school in general, was never my thing.”

  “Eva,” Adam says to Betty, “is what you would call one of us. Her great-great-grandfather was a Jew from Morocco.”

  “She knew Rachida?”

  Adam raises the back of the chaise so he is sitting up. He sniffs his drink. “Eva’s great-great-grandfather was a rubber trader from Rabat who lived in the Amazon at the turn of the century. The rest of her heritage is Bora Indian.”

  “So she’s an Indian Jew?” her father asks. “I never heard of that.”

  “Grow up, Dad. There are Chinese Jews. There are Pakistani Jews. Judaism is a religion, not a blood type.”

  Caro stands. “I’m going for a swim.” She shoots her father a look. He nods and rises to his feet. Caro takes Adam’s drink from his hand while her father yanks Adam’s glasses from his nose.

  “You grow up,” Caro says as she and her father tip Adam into the pool.

  5

  It is the first evening Myra has been alone in the house in nearly two months. She sits in the garden with her notebook in hand, pleased but also a bit disoriented by the solitude.

  At the front of the notebook, she keeps her master list, her evolving teleology of love, which she has titled “A History of One Woman’s Passions.” At first, as for all mammals, she has written, there is the breast or, in her case, the substitute bottle, since she was born at a time when breastfeeding was viewed as slightly barbaric. Only for her, the bottle had been simply that—a disembodied receptacle with no sensual body attuned to hers. Anything more would have terrified her mother. Where her appetite should have been, Myra was left with a hole, so that to this day food brings her no pleasure; she eats to squelch hunger and acquire fuel, having to remind herself in the same way she has to pay attention to put gas in her car. But, of course, Dreis, her former analyst, said, you were starved for love. No cookie would do.

  Looking out from her crib, she saw the shadows of the venetian blind
s on the walls, the shift as the sun rose in the sky and the room lightened. Then later, the love of I can do it: walk, talk, ride, draw, and then read, which led to books, her first passion, the world opening from the pages. Books remained preeminent through her discovery of her own late-blooming body, not dwarfed until she found men: a boy in high school who read poetry and kissed her on a damp summer lawn, a boy in college who played the cello and had long lean legs and thick dirty blond hair. She slept naked with him, let him make her come with his fingers. It had been he, not she, who was too scared to have intercourse. With Larry, there had been her first and only deep romantic love, but it paled, or perhaps simply faded, with the onslaught of the love of her children, when she knew that she could survive the loss of him but not of them.

  There had been the twisted attachment, a sort of love, really, Dreis proclaimed, that she developed for pain: the miscarriages, over and over; her parents’ deaths, which left her not with a feeling of loss but with a sense of utter aloneness as she recognized that she had never been able to love either of them because neither had loved her. They had taken care of her the way a turtle does her young: providing until the season when the offspring can manage on its own. Foods with adequate nutrients, given without pleasure, so they were stripped of taste, shelter scrubbed so it felt more like an institution than a home, protection that forbade joy but left her limbs intact. Her parents died so quickly, there was no opportunity for her to take care of them (even that, it seemed, they had deprived her of), to transform what they’d not given her into something she would do for them.