Dria squealed out her pity laugh, then reached beneath the table and placed her hand on my belt buckle.

Dessert was served by Madelina, a fruit aspic.

“Good meat, Mother,” Bud said.

“Madelina made it,” Sandro sneered.

Suzanne shot her son a look that made me think: coat hanger.

“Are we using the same butcher?” Bud said. “The old kraut?”

“Don’t say that, Father,” Dria said. “It’s a slur. Kraut is a slur.”

Suzanne looked at her husband. “Honestly, dear, Jacob doesn’t want to hear about Germans.”

Bud waved his hands in mock surrender.

“What does Hanukkah have to do with the twelve tribes?” Sandro wanted to know. He’d eaten fourteen slices of lamb and left half his potato.

“I’m not sure, exactly,” I said.

“Can you name them?” The little butterball leered at me. “Benjamin, Judah, Levi, Dan—that’s the one that got lost—”

“Quit showing off,” Dria said. “It’s tacky. Everyone in this family is so tacky.” She released my belt buckle and let her little hand drop down onto my crotch.

Dria had sent me out to the back porch with Bud. I assumed this might be the occasion he would demand to know if I planned to deflower his daughter. (In fact, Dria had lost her virginity a year earlier, to a Sigma Chi who had plied her with grain alcohol and Walt Whitman, though this was not something I planned to share with her father.)

Suzanne was in the kitchen with Madelina. I had seen them huddled over the sink, enjoying the rich communion of disapproval.

Bud pulled a flask out, took a long slug, handed the flask to me.

I took a sip. “Wow.”

“They get the real stuff,” he screamed mysteriously. “From the viscount.”

“It certainly tastes real.”

“Goddamn Vichy money,” Bud said, with an unexpected bitterness. He was a short, thick man with the face of a grizzled cherub.

I took another swallow and stared into the dense stand of trees that bordered the property. Their trunks shone like pale fingers in the light from the house.

“Cedar,” Bud said sadly. He tapped his belly. “All right, let’s get this show on the road. You ready, Jack?”

“Sir?”

Bud tucked the flask into the back pocket of his wool trousers. He trundled off the porch and toward a small shed, from which he removed two giant axes. He handed one to me. The idea was that, having drunk our bourbon, we would now chop wood. These struck me as activities best conducted separately, but I was in no position to object. This was the Blacet tradition, and I wanted more than anything to be obedient to this tradition, so that later, on the very eve of Christmas, I would be granted unlimited access to Dria’s lovely, well-pruned lower half.

Bud began to hack at a nearby log. “You take that other end,” he said.