Mother exhaled smoke open-mouthed; smoke curled in the sunlight around her face. She blinked her long lashes slowly. “I think I’d like a drink, Barney,” she said. “Let’s go in the kitchen.”

Sometimes, as a child, he had heard that tone of voice; it had thrilled him then as it thrilled him now. It was a voice she could use on a picnic or when suddenly deciding that they should all forget about dinner at home and go to a movie and just eat candy and popcorn. Sometimes she would just drop the whole middle-class pretense, the whole anxious, fretful Motherhood role, and become for a while a lively, bouncy, sly person. And seeing it now, there with an erection pressing in his jeans, he knew that was the thing he had searched for in women, for years: the voice that said, “What the hell, Barney, anything goes.”

He looked nervously for a moment toward his father, opened his mouth to speak.

And Mother said, “Why don’t you just stay here and rest for a while, Allston? It’ll do you good.”

His father did not turn to face them. “Whatever you want, Anna,” he said.

“Well then,” she said and stood, smoothing her dress along her behind, checking her stocking seams. “Do you have any gin, Barney?” she said. “I’d like a Gibson.”

“Sure,” he said. Leaving the terrace, he reached for her arm, to help her across the threshold, to touch her.

She pulled away. “No touching, Barney,” she said. “You mustn’t touch the dead.”

The reminder was a shock, knotting his stomach. The whole Oedipus fantasy dissolved: getting his young mother drunk, running his hand up under her dress, along those pale silk stockings, lolling his tongue gently into her crimson mouth…

As he closed the French doors to the terrace she said, “Your father was always a good man, Barney. But there were some things he never wanted to understand.”

He looked through the glass at Daddy, sadly. There the man sat, alone as ever.

***

He fixed her a big, dry Gibson with trembling hands, and another for himself. She leaned against the refrigerator, cupped the drink in both hands, giggled. Then she drank greedily and he fixed her another.

“My father was rich, you know,” she said.

“I know.” Her father had been a banker in Cleveland. There had been pictures of him everywhere at home. He had died before Mother married, had left his money to a young mistress.

“This dress was made by Coco Chanel. Daddy would take me to New York in the summers, and we’d stay right there at the Pierre.”

He was astonished at that. He did not remember her talking about New York. But he had never imagined his mother, his anxious, cheaply dressed mother, as this gorgeous flapper.

Abruptly she took off her hat with one hand and set it on the dishwasher. Then she shook her head and the shiny black hair, short, beautifully cut, framed her face. His penis began to harden again, but hopelessly. She was dead, untouchable, now that the word “incest” was as meaningless to him, a virologist, as an obscure tribal taboo.