Margaret rises from the chair and settles the collar of her dressing gown more snugly around her slender neck. Tuxedo lifts his head and blinks at her as she moves to the fireplace and brushes the frame of one of the photographs with her thumb. If I squint my eyes, I can just perceive a pair of monochrome figures set against the outdoors, drenched in sunshine. I ask if those are her parents.

“No. It’s Benedict. Benedict and me. In Germany one summer, before the war.” She drags on the cigarette. “Our mother was German.”

“Yes, I know.”

She lifts the photograph and strokes the picture’s edge, as if she’s rubbing something away. “We loved it there so much, like it was home. Isn’t that strange? But we always visited in summer, when the sun was shining, unlike Scotland. Benedict loved to go hunting for new plants. That was his obsession, even then.”

“Botany,” I say.

“Yes. He was always outdoors. There was this lake at the edge of the garden. I taught him to swim there. He was six.”

“Isn’t that a little old to start swimming?”

“My grandmother wouldn’t let him near the water.”

“Really? Why not?”

She flicks ash into the fireplace and replaces the photograph on the mantel. The metal makes a decisive noise as it strikes the marble. She turns to me and folds her arms. “Grandmothers have their reasons. You haven’t eaten, have you?”

“Not since lunch.”

“Then I suppose we’d better make dinner.”

Dinner is brown bread, margarine, pea soup with tiny pieces of ham, washed down with weak tea. I ask her about Thorpe as a boy, about summers in Germany, about this grandmother of theirs, but she doesn’t want to answer me. Instead she asks me about my own childhood, about America, about my parents, and she listens earnestly to my replies. “How queer,” she says, over and over, as if America is something exotic, as if my father and mother are a species of animal you find in a zoo.

We wash the dishes. She shows me to the lavatory and finds me a toothbrush. She shows me to my room—Thorpe’s room—and only at the last second, as we exchange awkward good nights at the door, do I summon the resolve to press her again about her past.

“Do you miss it? Germany, I mean. Could you ever go back?”

“Go to Germany? Are you mad?”

I shrug one shoulder, like a question. Margaret bends down and lifts Tuxedo from the floor, where he’s been winding around my legs, making suggestive noises. She strokes the fur between his ears. When she speaks, she addresses herself to the cat, not to me.

“I’m afraid there are certain places to which you can never return.”

Elfriede

October 1900

(Germany)