He threw back the blankets and tried to pull her to him but she resisted. “No,” she said, “no! I have to tell you this, I have to—he’s too young, Fitz. Way too young. You’ve got to do something. Talk to him. And don’t give me that boys-will-be-boys crap either . . .”

He had talked to him, back in the fall when they’d first discovered he wasn’t sleeping in his room, and if he hadn’t exactly laid down the law—that wasn’t his method, and besides which, it made him feel like a hypocrite—they’d at least come to an understanding. As far as he knew, Corey had been sleeping in his room ever since—he even checked on him every once in a while, just to reassure himself. When he thought about it, that is, and he had to admit he didn’t think about it all that often. Boys will be boys, that was how he felt, and girls will be girls, and the Alte Haus and the surrounding hills and fields featured a hundred places for private assignations, as he himself knew full well. Corey wasn’t the little boy he used to read aloud to, not anymore. And it wasn’t as if he was haunting dark alleys or taking the train into Harlem and soliciting prostitutes. Nancy was fine. Nancy was adequate. And Corey would outgrow her and go on to college—or she’d outgrow him. It was all the same.

But Joanie wouldn’t hear of it. Her voice was bitter, her eyes burning. “I don’t want him to wind up like us.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean then?”

She looked away in exasperation. She was trembling, angry still—and cold, that too. Again he reached out for her and again she pushed him away. “I mean he’s too young.”

Now, in the chill of the bedroom on the first morning of her exile, Corey slapped the loose-leaf rhythmically against his thigh and said, “I forgot to mention happy.”

“Happy? What do you mean?”

He gave a little smile, and he was still a kid, still and always. “One big happy family,” he said, and then he pulled back the door, slipped out into the hallway and was gone.