“It’s not for Thorpe.” I settle on the chair, take the soup from Annie, and peer into Mrs. Thorpe’s hopeful face. Her hair is uniformly white, but something tells me this is the redhead in the family tree. I should mention that she’s chattering away as all this takes place. You can’t really understand the words—aside from the Scotch brogue, she’s got no teeth—but whatever she’s saying, the woman’s got a lot of it to communicate. I wait until she pauses for breath and stick the spoon in the hole. She swallows it down and smiles gummily, like when the twins were babies, and I think it’s maybe just as well I’m getting the practice, isn’t it? How, if we’re lucky to survive the measles and the tree climbing, the wars and the childbirth, disease and famine and Hitler and Tito and the crosstown bus barreling down Fifty-Ninth Street, we come right back to the beginning before heading west into the unknown, to meet our Maker just as we left him, helpless.

The feeding of Mrs. Thorpe takes some time, and Annie and Margaret retire to the kitchen, where at least there’s a range to keep the air warm. I occupy this hour by telling her a little about me, about how I met her grandson, what a dear fellow he is, how the king of England married us, how I’ve got a bun in the oven already, her great-grandchild. I leave out the part about Colditz, not because I don’t want to upset her—she doesn’t understand a word I’m saying—but because I don’t want to upset myself. It seems to me that this is a moment for fairy tales, for a story that ends well, for a fiction you know is a fiction that comforts you anyway.

When the spoon scrapes a final time against the bowl, and the lady deigns to accept this offering, I wipe her mouth carefully with the napkin, settle her comfortably on her pillows, and ask if there will be anything else, Mrs. Thorpe.

“Johann,” she says clearly.

I beg her pardon.

“Dear boy. Hair like his mama.”

(Understand, if you please, that she speaks in a toothless, whistling lisp, so I may not be translating precisely.)

“Ah. Yes. They were both blond, weren’t they?”

“But she was mad, poor thing. What could I do?” She looks at me earnestly, like a moment of clarity has come upon her and she wants to know this thing, she really wants to know what she could have done, other than what she did.

“Buried her properly, perhaps.”

“I couldn’t let the children see her, not the state she was in.”