Once he had, in King Lear, and knew it was a better part than the king’s, in the play and in life. Patricia would probably see him as an old Lear now, giving up his authority to his daughters. The difference was that he’d never had any authority over them and didn’t want it.

‘Where’s your gumption, David Crown?’ his wife would demand when he didn’t stand up for himself at work, in a restaurant, in a ticket line.

David rarely regretted the loss of it, then never in public. On one or two things he should have had the gumption to stand up to his wife before she was too ill, dying, and it was too late. He had been too close to her, had watched at too close range her natural young confidence transformed by the death of their first child into protective self-righteousness. She took that inexplicable cot death as punishment for whatever random sins she could assign herself, imagined neglects, self-absorptions, and lived increasingly as if the slightest moral lapse could wreak such vengeance. And should. That was the overstep she made from which he should have drawn her back. In his silence, he had been her accomplice. He had gradually learned to forgive her for it, but not himself.

Sitting on the brightly lit and empty bus going back to West Point Grey, David wished his memory could be as aimless as his wandering had been, but it never was. It snagged again and again on that pair of deaths, his father’s and his son’s.

David made an image of them. They looked exactly alike. They shared his name, and they were both the same age, twenty-three, the age his father had been when he died and David was born. It was also the age David had been when his son died. If his son had lived, he’d be forty-two and David’s father would be eighty-eight, both far too old for his romantic mourning of them. Why sentence either of them to a long life they didn’t have?

Yet it eased David to imagine his son as a grown man. He lacked the emotional courage to grieve for him, as Patricia had, a baby who hadn’t taken his first step or spoken his first word.

And those deaths had made David the cautious man he was, obliged to stay alive as the first duty to everyone he had loved, mother, sister, wife, daughters. But now lonely, reaching into the past for the companionship of his sister or his wife, he came up against another pairing of failures, his inability to reconcile those two women, a failure which had cleaved his life in two for all these years. What perverse loyalty to Patricia was it that still kept David from doing what he desperately wanted to do, to go to his sister and ask her forgiveness?