She nodded and leaned her chin against her knees. “We’d talked before, a little. She had great instincts about me. I think she knew from that first morning, at breakfast, that I was interested in you. But she didn’t say very much, not then. Little things, you know. Trying to pry out of me what I was trying to hide. But the night we really talked, and I told her how I felt, was that night, after we went to Arch’s. We were in my room. She cried.”

“Did I frighten her that much?” I said.

Amy reached for my hand, touched it, pulled her hand back. “It wasn’t you, Bobo. It was me. She knew that I was growing up, that I was in that awkward girl-woman stage no one ever understands. Until that summer, I had had boyfriends, but they weren’t really boyfriends. They were just wonderful little infatuations that would come and go like mood swings, and my mother had helped me through them with a lot of patience and a lot of caring. She knew it was different with you. She told me there was something about you that made her know it. And, believe me, Bobo, since I’ve been a mother to three daughters, I’ve learned a lot about the intuition of parents. You may not understand what goes on in your own life, but with your children, you know. You always know.”

I thought of my own children and I understood.

“Tell me about your husband,” I said.

She did not respond for a long moment. She gazed at the fire and the reflection of the fire waved in her eyes, flickered like candles. Then she said, “Peter’s a good man. He cares deeply, I think. His work—” She paused. “I love him, but it’s never been a complete marriage, and that’s more my fault than his.”

“Why?”

She turned her face to me. Her face looked like the painting in Jean Archer’s bedroom.

“Don’t you know?” she answered quietly. “When Peter and I married, I loved you. I loved you with the one thing I couldn’t share with anyone else—with joy, Bobo. With joy.” She blinked and her eyes were shining.

“It was that, wasn’t it?” I said. “Joyful. That’s the perfect word. I used to think I would split apart with joy.”

She smiled and looked again at the fire. It was as though she could read the fire, the way she watched it shimmering over the wood. Then she asked, “Do you remember the day we said good-bye in Avrum’s room?”

“Of course. Yes.”

“I told you I wanted to make love to you.”

“I remember.”

“I thought about that for years,” she said. “But I was never ashamed of that feeling. I wondered what would have happened if we had. But we couldn’t, of course. Not in that time.”