He looks and the person holding his arm is his father. The relief of this makes him suddenly dizzy. He might have fallen himself, but his father’s grip keeps him upright. His father is wearing Richard’s hump and Othello’s cloak. He carries a hotel pillowcase over his back like St. Nicholas, knobby with two crowns, as well as with some other bits of costumes that are easily carried—eye patches, Othello’s earring, Iago’s hose. Also letters from Mother and Rosalie, and a few of last week’s reviews. Later, when he unpacks it, Edwin will see that his father took the time to cull the best of these. His father throws Hamlet’s cape onto Edwin’s shoulders.

The light has become so strange now, thin and blurred, and ash is falling like snow from the sky. For a few moments, Edwin has the odd feeling that he and his father are alone in a small, unhurried place, under a bell jar, while outside the glass, all is roil, cacophony, and dimly heard chaos. “Where are we going?” Edwin asks and he doesn’t even have to raise his voice. He takes a shallow breath and the taste of smoke goes all the way down his throat and into his lungs.

His father ties a scarf over his nose and mouth, hands Edwin one to do the same. “Upwards. Mansion Hill,” his father says, muffled as a bandit. Moments later: “Mark my words, it will turn out to be a woman caused it.”

Mansion Hill proves to be a long climb away. Eventually, the crowd substantially reduced, they arrive at the old Kane estate, an elegant house of yellow brick, surrounded by stands of maple and pines, its once spacious grounds now cut through with roads and alleyways. From the gated entry, his father lowers his scarf and expounds authoritatively to the other evacuees about the methods the firefighters will use. All the ingenuity of man—the leather buckets, the horse-drawn pumps—will prove futile against the dreadful power of the great fire. “When God claps His hands . . .” his father says. He quotes William Blake.

Little fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

The contemplation of human frailty seems to please Edwin’s father enormously. He turns then to another equally pleasurable narrative—the egalitarian camaraderie of the volunteer firefighters. Apparently his father had once missed a curtain call to join in a communal effort to quell a fire. Edwin has never heard this story before. Under his scarf, he smells his own breath and the smell is stale and unpleasant.