They went to parties on the Fourth of July, and then it was down to doldrums, dog days, malaise, parlous times. Dee said she spent too much time reading news magazines in doctors’ offices, and that while the entire world was a tragedy, all of life was a pain in the ass. The mood of the house was fretful. It was hot and the kitchen sink was plugged. Merle, overworked and almost always hungover, spent hours apologizing after he sniped at Dee from under the sink.

One night, after a week of rain, they watched Papa’s movies. Arnold, as an early birthday gift for Papa, tracked down better prints of three of the movies they’d made when they were both young men, and the large reels lay on the dining room table while they tried to get the projector working again and argued about which friends were dead or still alive. Merle managed to fix the projector and hang a sheet. By then all the men were a little drunk. They watched a few minutes of The Tempest, the oldest. Papa said it was a snore and no one would possibly believe that was a real donkey’s head. He left the room for Tales of Arabia, because his first wife, Perdita, had died soon after filming, and even Polly and Edmund, amused by the silly magic and the bad makeup of the djinns, were uneasy at the idea of her face disappearing. Dee wouldn’t stay in the room for The Window, about an evil man with a bad conscience, but Arnold and Merle giggled to the point of tears when the villain first appeared—a mustache, eye paint, flaring nostrils.

“What was his name?” asked Arnold. “The inspiration? I can’t recall.”

“Hush,” said Dee, from the kitchen. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

The Amber Queen began and everyone quieted down, because Perdita played the queen, too, and the story had given Jane her love of flood stories. Papa had learned the fable as a boy: It was an explanation for the amber trees that formed when a Baltic forest drowned and washed up for millennia, the amber traded as far away as Rome and China. It was an Ice Age story, told when the sea level was lower and people might still have found long chunks that still looked like trees, when the shapes might have been visible in the moment before tsunamis, from a boat on a clear still day. It was a perfect example of man constructing stories to explain mysteries, like creating dragons from the Protoceratops skulls on the Gobi. The queen chose the king of the sun over the king of the ocean, and the ocean sent a flood in revenge. She managed to save her people but gave up her own life to see the sun again.