“They let the men who did that off scot-free. Well, it’s getting late and I’ve kept you too long. Come along. Let me help you into the car. Read The Oresteia, Rhoda. When you finish it, let me know and I’ll decide what’s next. Education, they call it. They call it educating people.” He opened the back door and put us into the car and closed all the car doors and stood in the alley waving as we drove away.

“Read the book he gave you,” Irise said, as soon as we were on the highway heading south. “Read it out loud. I love to hear you read.”

“Open the wine,” Charles William added. “Let’s drink wine and hear Dee read the play. Donald went to school in New England, Dee. He put himself on a train when he was thirteen and went up north to Exeter and Harvard. Then he came back to live in Birmingham as though he’d never been away.”

“He likes selling books to us,” Irise suggested. “He’s from an old old family, Rhoda. A lot of his people are pretty crazy.”

Irise opened the wine and poured it into paper cups and passed the cups around. Charles William drove the car. I read out loud from Agamemnon. “Zeus, whose will has marked for man the sole way where wisdom lies; ordered one eternal plan: Man must suffer to be wise.”

“He sacrificed his daughter to make his ships sail,” Charles William said. “I remember now. They had this huge army assembled on the beach, all the chieftains and their soldiers and their ships. But the winds didn’t come so they just sat there with the soldiers getting restless. Then the priests told him to send for his daughter and they sacrificed her. They told her mother she was coming to Aulis to be married to Achilles.”

“Oh, God, this is so much fun. I’m so glad we’re doing this. So glad we got away.” I leaned back in the seat. The barren winter scenery seemed beautiful to me. Charles William and Irise in the front seat. Wine to drink, books to read, strange new poetry to enlist my dreams.

“So you’re really divorcing Malcolm?” Charles William asked. “You aren’t going to change your mind and go back to him?”

“I can’t. He’s so mean to me. He never lets me have any friends. And he told me I was fat. I’m not fat. You know I’m not fat.”

“It’s all he knows how to say,” Irise suggested. “He’s not a very happy person.” She took my cup and filled it from the bottle, which she was holding between her legs. “You want ice in it or not?”