She had, for example, not known that what was going to happen to her would happen and yet how had the event not been present in her life already, at all times and in all she did? It would take place. A tragedy may be well dispersed even previous to its occurrence. One learns that one could not have known and yet one also perceives in the present, with anguish, that there were certain signs, certain tells. Clare had gone to visit her father with some foreboding and had pretended that this foreboding did not exist. She had almost not traveled that June, finding Manhattan very mild and good. Only she did not want to be boring, which is to say she believed herself a promising writer and had lusted delicately after new material, and so she had gone to see her father in Paris, to see his life and learn just how disconcerting each of them would find this encounter after years of separation.

Clare’s American father refused to write in English and therefore he was at once a writer of a certain interest and a writer of middling renown. His death, Clare was finding, was doing something to elevate him, but it was possible even this would pass. The query emails had of late slackened. Her father resented French but also resented something he termed, in one essay, “the Usonian,” i.e., what people speak in the U.S. of A. To Clare he was a stern and distant voice, if ever he was a presence. If she could understand him now, he had been unworldly but ambitious, driven by notions of authenticity and craft that had, before the accident, seemed to Clare a fantasy designed to shelter him from the realities of the international literary market, such as it was, plus history; there was nothing for him in the country into which he had been born and little his adopted language could mean to Americans. His whole life was, in Clare’s prematurely jaded opinion, an exercise in refusing to abandon what was already, and very definitively, lost. The peach tree behind his parents’ Yonkers Victorian had come in for special consideration in one volume of poetry widely cited as his best in the French press. Clare had been contacted by her father’s English translator several years ago while in college. The translator had wanted to meet with her. Apparently her father was—what had been the term?—not inscrutable or tricky but, oh yes, that perfect word, elusive. “An elusive guy,” ugh. Clare had declined, coldly. For she wanted to be her own writer and did not wish to seed her sentences with baleful references to postwar peach trees.