“Don’t you know?” He looked at me dubiously. Our styles were not jelling at all. And my disappointment took the form of rudeness and that didn’t help either.

“He was my grandfather,” he went on in a subdued but edgy voice. “Editor and publisher and quite a wit. He did this column, ‘The Compost Heap’—most amusing if you spark to rustic humor.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I think you’ve got things twisted.”

“But you said…”

“My Thomas Chatterton was the youngest major poet in the history of English literature. Chatterton—my Chatterton,” I went on icily, “was born, as the illuminated will recall, in Bristol, 1752, and died by his own hand in 1770.” My father’s son, right? I sure was creeping the hell into his heart, right?

Chatterton chose to ignore my contentiousness. “He was a relative of mine?” He frowned with perplexity. “You’re sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Look—your name’s Phillips—that’s my Chatterton’s mother’s maiden name. Valerie Phillips. Moreover…”

“Valerie? That’s my daughter’s name…”

“You see?”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch. And he did himself in? At eighteen?”

“Seventeen. ‘A fate-marked babe,’ he called himself in The Storie of William Canynge.” I shook my head in frustration. “What could possibly have given you the idea I’d be interested in the Cockeysville Weekly Nosebleed?”

He flushed. “How the hell would I know?” His eyes went sullen and hard. “People nowadays write dissertations on the goddamdest subjects, or so I’ve been told.”

Pouting, he fussed over the stack of newspapers as if he were tidying up a favorite room, aligning them gently, lovingly.

He had been told right. I remembered my father, years ago, telling my mother and me in that pursy, gleefully contemptuous way of his about a doctoral candidate at Corn Pone U. whose discipline was animal husbandry. His thesis, “Does a Bull Control the Sex of His Get?” was accepted, and later printed in some scholarly barnyard journal.

But here, in the momentary silence and the everlasting heat, what made matters worse was my unreconstructed nastiness. I had to watch myself; I should have known enough to be respectful, to be courteous toward people who were trying to help me, whether they succeeded or not. Try to remember, I told myself, it’s not Chatterton’s fault that my father walked out on me.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m sorry…”

He sniffed the air querulously, cocking a cold eye at me, as if I were bilboed under his microscope and my true self were suddenly revealed to him—a Muslim spy with false papers, or some kind of goddam freak. I knew what was coming.

“How old are you?” he asked suspiciously.

I had long ago learned not to lie about my age, if for no other reason than that, despite my six-foot frame, I actually looked younger than my years.

“Fourteen,” I said.