Memory confounds and veils them, and were they ever clear to begin with? They were hidden from each other by a distorting rage, by sorrow, by the plain nameless gulf that comes between people. Whatever became of their kindness? Hard to see them even now, years later, far away from them, years away. Can I find them in these phantom rooms (only paint, only light on a screen) whose entrances and exits bend and shadow, diminish and vanish?

I look deeper into the dreamed house: sonorous old clock marking the shadowy hour. Sad objects: ancient blue pitcher with a stag in high relief, cracked blue-and-white cups, photographs of the dead, faces cooling as they travel on into their seclusion. Who knows their names now? Sway of the old clock’s golden pendulum. Sepia print of hunting dogs pointing to unseen prey. Glasses chill with gleaming distillates: vodka, turpentine. And here is the woman, weeping beside a painting she’s made, a bruised-looking bowl of lilacs, their cloud of dark panicles seething anger or sorrow. If I came upon her when she didn’t expect anyone, mightn’t I see something that would help me to understand her, and the obliterating gesture she’ll make toward her son?

The museum vanishes.

Cool black pistol dreaming in a drawer. A folding wooden yardstick edged in brass, precise case of drafting tools, a man also seething: resentment, loneliness? Though he’s well hidden, attempting to disappear in my dollhouse mirrors. A lace-paper doily folded into a little fan, a souvenir: here the daughter who’s already gone, smart girl, run as far and fast as she can. In this room—so far back in the house you wonder that you could ever find him!—a boy lost in a book, which is itself a tiny box. He’s dreaming into its unseen rooms, rooms he’ll travel all his life. Somewhere in the air above him a strange bird flashes by, flutter and hurry, bright turbulence. The book he’s reading configures this space: house and mother, sister and closet and father, endless hallway, tumult of wings. His book angles and skews them by artifice, and then tries to use artifice to set them right.

PART ONE

1

Rainbow Girls

In 1959, in Memphis, Tennessee, my sister, Sally, became a Rainbow Girl. She’d been initiated, she told me, into a secret society. What did it mean? What were they not allowed to tell? It was my family’s year for the sororal; my mother joined the Order of the Eastern Star and wore around her neck a little golden symbol which indicated her membership. I liked their name—ceremonial, vaguely Egyptian—but the simple necklace was far less interesting than the florid ephemera of the Rainbow Girls, the things Sally hid in the treasury of her lowest dresser drawer, mementos of every one of their occasions.