“You’re so caught up in the details,” her husband said, sounding too kind, as if he had wiped clean the contempt just before he got the gibe spoken. He had to be careful. He could not seem to get ready, even a little, for divorce. A golfer, he was tapping his sun-damaged fingers on a side table. They were mottled, and it wounded him to see it.

It had been too long since the historian had heard anyone with a command of the grand sweep argue the particulars. Mabel had become little more than a provocateur. She used to have thoughts he wanted to hear. He shivered. They had the air conditioning on the highest setting. They always did. It wasn’t even a hot night. It was September, just past Labor Day. His lips felt scaly. His left arm was numb.

“Every day, the paper says who is dying and how many,” said a small lawyer with an exact voice. “But it’s a trickle. Not like Vietnam.”

“A trickle,” the economist agreed. “And all volunteers. No draft.”

“Any number is too much,” said his wife.

“More would have died,” Don was saying to another conversation farther down the table. “The prisoner-of-war camps the Japanese ran during the war—I know a dear friend, a terrific woman, she and her parents were liberated. The Enola Gay was their savior.”

“Our Japanese camps—those, what that was—there was an exhibit by a son of one of the internees. Installation art. I found it powerful,” offered a guest; Mabel thought he was from Los Angeles. He couldn’t seem to get his bearings, even this late in the evening.

“Have you seen the new Holocaust museum in Berlin?” asked the cellist, sensing his constant tottering.

“It’s actually a museum of Jewish history,” said the architect. He felt better.

“Photographs of the GIs liberating the camps,” Don began.

“Remember the St. Louis,” said a smart young writer.

“Roosevelt turned away that ship with ease,” said the historian. “To very little outcry.”

“What ship?” asked the cellist.

“Four hundred thousand Africans,” said the editor, who had not heard the cellist’s question. “Our ambassador to the UN, the grandson of Holocaust victims, did nothing to stop it.”

“I saw the movie, that one about the hotel keeper,” said the architect.

“What about this, this report that came out of Sissy?” Mabel decided to ask. SSCI, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She needed someone to tell her something about it. Her jibberjash of a column was due tomorrow. “I have calls out all over town about that report. I’m told it’s remarkable.”

“So much of the report is classified,” Don said.