The girl brought in two trays loaded with a hot chocolate-­colored drink, rolls, and tiny silver receptacles of whipped cream by each cup, starched stiff linen napkins, hand-­painted china cups. Sidney drank greedily, his mouth stained with the chocolate drink and whipped cream which he consumed separately.

“Whatever you wish in the way of remuneration,” she began now on more practical considerations, “ask, simply ask . . . Where he is concerned nothing is too much, don’t you agree?”

Then almost without warning, and as in a film where the scene and time sequence change precipitously, and with her voice falling into a low register, she said, “You may or may not know the story of Gareth, but let me tell you to prevent misunderstanding and correct any garbled version you may have listened to. . . . Before our calamity . . .” she had begun, but here the maid had come in to collect the trays and was dismissed by a mere look from her, “we had had no idea Gareth was keeping such bad company, or that he was using, well, a certain drug. We had no inkling of any of that.”

Sidney found himself, to his own consternation, breaking almost into a grin, which she may not have seen, for she went ahead with what she wished him to know: “His father and his two twin brothers were going to get the new horse from the stables over in Virginia. Gareth was the best driver, you may know, and of course he was the oldest of my sons . . .”

“Who were his bad company, ma’am, may I inquire?” Sidney interrupted. She paused only long enough to ignore his question, and continued:

“I begged them not to go that day. All their horoscopes were bad in the newspaper, for one thing. I told them I would drive. They paid no attention to me, Sidney. None whatsoever. . . . It happened at high noon. Gareth had been smoking this drug his friends had been giving him. But he must have seen the train coming, nonetheless, grass or no grass . . . How could he have failed to?”

She stopped and looked at his mouth, perhaps to see if it moved in the strange smile she had caught him in before.

“But I’m a bit ahead of my story. . . . The actual wreck was caused, a witness claims, by a race. Yes, that is correct, a race. A young man riding a horse, according to this observer, passed our truck several times, and the rider is said to have taunted Gareth, shouted abuse at him, and dared him to race him to the train crossing. Another motorist also later told me the same story, but he refused nonetheless to appear at the inquest. (I disremember his name too after all this time.) ‘Let’s race, Garey! Let’s beat the train!’ the horseman is said to have exclaimed. ‘I’ll race you to the train tracks and beat you . . . Will you race me,’ he kept calling, ‘or are you chicken?’ And so they raced, Sidney, raced the train. And the horseback rider got across the tracks in time, and won the race, and me and mine you see did not . . .”