I’m not sure I agreed this was their sole motive. Julia had had her own celebrity moment (albeit briefly and long ago), and Marco himself was not a totally unknown commodity, so there was some scandal mileage in each of them in their own right. But no doubt the connection to Sir Alec helped. Either way, the thought of his father getting dragged into this was upsetting to Marco for all sorts of reasons. He’d always had a sense of himself as somehow questionable, dubious even, compared to his father: generationally inferior you could say; condemned, by historical forces if not personal inclination, to be looser and loucher. So the accusations touched a nerve. Then, too, he was just plain mortified; ashamed at the prospect of his father seeing him engulfed in this miasma that seemed to be moving toward him, wafting like a bad smell out of Sauer’s emails.

He steeled himself for battle, resolving not to trouble his old man’s peace, even though he could have used his advice.

3

3

THE FIRST I HEARD of all this was in May of 2016, when Marco called me upstate and invited himself for the weekend: “I need to talk to you about something . . .”

He was wearing one of his usual casually dapper outfits when I picked him up at the train station—dark jacket over a mustard turtleneck, English cords tapering to grained leather boots. But he looked pretty ragged all the same: eyes bloodshot, gray-brown stubble blurring the normally clean lines of his chin and cheekbones.

“I haven’t slept for a month,” he said, catching the look on my face.

“How come?”

“Tell me something. Have you been following these sexual harassment dramas in the news?”

“You mean like . . . Bill Cosby?”

“Cosby, Assange, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jian Ghomeshi . . . Do you follow them?”

I felt a shade apprehensive.

“Some, a little. Why?”

“What interests you about them?”

“I mean, they’re all very different from each other, aren’t they?”

“In what way?”

“Well . . . I suppose with some it’s just the fascination of hearing about appalling behavior . . .”

He nodded gloomily. “And others?”

“Maybe something more like a suspense novel? Guilty or not guilty? The mystery of what happens between two people in a room. I think I prefer that kind.”

“Why?”

“I guess because there’s no basis for an objective judgment, which means the onus of belief is entirely on the believer.”

I had a foreboding, as I spoke, of what he was about to tell me—the gist of it if not the details. It stirred an odd mixture of reactions: empathy, but also something more like self-protectiveness. Certainly I didn’t want to indicate any willingness to be recruited in support of some defunct male prerogative, if that was where this was going.

“The onus of belief . . .” Marco repeated, thoughtfully. “What does that mean, ‘the onus of belief is on the believer?’ ”