The memory was of walking across this same bridge with his father on a summer Saturday long ago—in fact, more than forty years ago. There were men standing at the bridge railing at intervals along the pedestrian walkway, casting lines out into the tidal current—shirtless men, tanned and sweating in the August sun. He could hear their reels whining as the lines flew out, big baited hooks and sinkers drawing them out in long arcs over the water. The sun was glinting here and there—on the water, on the stainless-steel reels, on the chrome bumpers of passing cars. The men were serious, intent on their activity, adjusting their rods, taking the slack out of their lines, watching the currents. They had seemed to Gurney like creatures from another world, utterly mysterious and out of reach. His father wasn’t ever shirtless or tanned, never stood in a row with other men, never engaged in any group activity. His father wasn’t an outdoorsman in that sense, certainly not a fisherman.

Although Gurney could not have articulated it at the age of six or seven when they took those three-mile Saturday walks from their Bronx apartment out over the City Island Bridge, the problem was that he didn’t feel that his father was anything. His father, even on those walks together, was an enigma—a quiet, secretive man with no overt interests—a man who never spoke of the past or revealed any interest in the future.

Parking in the narrow, shaded side street in front of Malcolm Claret’s weathered clapboard house, Gurney felt the way he always felt when he’d been thinking about his father—empty and alone. He tried to shake the feeling as he approached the front door.

He naturally expected Claret to look older, perhaps a bit grayer or balder, than the image, nearly two decades out of date, that he carried in his memory. But he wasn’t prepared for the shrunken physique of the man who greeted him in the unfurnished foyer. Only the eyes at first seemed the same—soft blue eyes with an even, unblinking gaze. And the gentle smile—that was the same too. In fact, if anything, those two defining elements of Claret’s wise and peaceful presence seemed to have become more pronounced, more concentrated, with the passing of time.

“Come in, David.” The frail man gestured toward the same office Gurney had visited years earlier—a space that gave the impression of having once been, along with the foyer, an enclosed sun porch.

Gurney went in and looked around, struck by the instant familiarity of the little room. Claret’s brown leather chair, showing fewer signs of aging than the man himself, was in the same position Gurney remembered, facing two other small armchairs, both of which appeared to have been reupholstered in the intervening years. A short-legged table sat at the center of the rough triangle formed by the chairs.