“Paul Celan. ‘Heart and heart. Deemed too heavy. Heavier become. Lighter be.’ My translation. He drowned himself in the Seine.”

“He was a poet. Like you.”

Mr. T. smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Like me.”

Late that afternoon, as I walked to the subway, I thought about Uncle Richard again. I sometimes think that it made me—the murder, I mean. I thought about Mr. T., about his father and grandfather and my father and grandfather and about the earlier generations who occupy the mental terrain within us and the silences on that old ground, where shifting wraiths pass or speak in voices so low we can’t hear what they are saying.

ALTHOUGH EGLANTINE AND I dismantled the string sculpture the following evening, Miranda didn’t come upstairs to fetch her daughter. Instead, she called for Eggy, and the child, after a few minutes of dawdling, took to the stairs. My evening with Miranda had reconfigured that vague country we refer to as the future, a place inhabited exclusively by fears and wishes. Jeffrey Lane had penetrated one of my wishes with uncanny speed, had seen it before he even spoke to me. I had hoped to “win” Miranda and lead her and Eggy up the stairs into the domain of family happiness. But I had begun to understand that the woman couldn’t be won by me or by anybody else. She had come to me with her confession and her desire to be taken care of “a little bit,” but there was resistance in her character, too, and a will to independence that meant no one would be allowed to tell her story for her.

“IT’S TRUE,” SONIA said in a firm, low voice. “Dad screwed that woman and gave me a brother. I don’t understand why Mom’s so calm about it, almost like a robot. ‘The truth is what it is,’ she keeps saying. Like I don’t get it. I get it. I just don’t like it. She thinks I should go to that meeting with Henry and Edie and the Hamburger.”

As she spoke, the gray light from outside the Greek restaurant on Church Street illuminated her defiant face. Her eyes and her expression at that moment are cut into my mind with unusual precision. Although I had been prepared for the possibility that Max had another child, the fact jolted me, and that shock is surely behind the power of the memory. “whatever you decide,” I said. “I’m glad you’re talking.”

I thought about Joel, whom I’d never seen, a boy who would have to struggle with a father who had become a tall stack of books and four movies. I wondered if he had seen his young mother as Lili, with her bright eyes and beautiful grin, the elusive sylph of an aging man’s fantasy. Would Joel get lost among these fictions? Would he find a place for himself as the son of Max Blaustein and move on?