I’d never seen Duncan laugh without bitterness or sarcasm since Before Dad Died. It almost felt like we were huddled around the dinner table in the old house in Stockton again, with Dad telling us some obscure fact he’d dug up in his research. Usually, he would mix in some lie, and the unspoken assumption was that we’d try to ferret it out with our questions. Sometimes, the truth was so outrageous that finding the lie took a while. He would sit back in his chair, eyebrows raised in a look of innocence—something that always made Mom laugh—and answer us with a straight face. (I always knew when Dad wasn’t telling the truth, because the faintest lilt or musical quality would enter his voice—as if the joy of constructing the story was too much for him to contain.)

These lunches with Bonmot formed pockets of time and space separate from the stress and rigor of my responsibilities (or lack thereof). Where everything else blended together in a blur of faces and cafés and alcohol, that sun-filled courtyard with its rustling willows, light-soaked dark wooden benches, and aged gray stone tables riven with fissures still remains with me, even in this place. And Bonmot was one with the benches and tables: weathered but comfortable, solid and stolid both. His hands felt like stone hands, his two-fisted greeting like having your skin encased in granite. He had been a farmer’s son before he found his calling, and his hulking physique remained intact, along with a startling openness and honesty in his light brown eyes. Nothing in him indicated a propensity for clerical crimes. (The honesty didn’t come easily to him. He had earned his reform, and it had transformed him.) His speech rippled out like liquid marble, strong and smooth. He was, in all ways, a comfort.

As for Bonmot and Duncan, they pulled back far enough from the rift that was Duncan’s long-ago banned book to find they shared many interests, from explorations of history and religion to a taste for the same music and art. More than once, I would walk into that blissful place carrying sandwiches bought from a sidewalk vendor to find the two men deep in conversation, Bonmot’s wrinkled face further creased with laugh lines, his melon-bald head bowed and nodding as Duncan hammered home some obscure point, Duncan’s hands heavy with the weight of knowledge being expressed through them. Two veterans of exile, reborn in the pleasure of each other’s company. (Which isn’t to say we didn’t argue—we argued, sometimes viciously. We knew where we stood with one another.)

Early on, Duncan dispensed with politeness and pressed Bonmot about his faith. Duncan’s journal relates one such discussion, over an early lunch I wasn’t at: