Even later he could not decide whether she was trying to seduce him or be a listening friend.

Think of B while saying D. Think B, say D. But all his life he could only say what he thought. He never got any better at it.

He practiced with the hen, whom he loathed. He wouldn’t do it in front of Lottie. “The boy bought a ball,” he said to his reflection. The doy dought a doll. You could try it with Gs, too. The goy got a gall. That at least was a sentence. Maybe he hated the whole enterprise. With the hen on his hand he could feel half his soul, more, leak from his body into the puppet, Siamese twins, the hen the twin with the major organs. The thing he could never do—he saw, looking in the mirror—was hold still. The hen spoke. Jack raised his eyebrows, pecked at the air. He had no talent for making believe. He could not stop being himself.

He could hear his father say it. You just can’t stop being yourself, can you?

He’d thought he’d feel at home in England. In upstate New York they all were foreigners: despite his accent, Jack’s childhood clothes were English, ordered through the mail, and his packed lunches, and his particular snobberies that drove his classmates crazy. He did not have friends at school because he felt superior to everyone, and also inferior.

But London was no better. Maybe he would enlist in the navy, but which one? He didn’t want to run away to join the circus: he loathed animals, and contortionists, and the sound of the whip. Perhaps he could sign back on with the crew of the QE2, and travel between countries for the rest of his life.

In England he could drink. It was legal. That was stunning. So he did. He accompanied Lottie on gigs: a glamorous one in a fancy house on Holland Park, where Lottie stood in the foyer and people lined the stairs to watch her; a depressing one in a basement theater near Brick Lane where nobody showed up. She always had to sing her song with the parrot, “You’re My Bird.” She asked Jack to come on television with her, not as a performer but an assistant, who took the figures in and out of their cases. She could have done it herself, she always did, but she dressed him in a suit that made him look like a dummy himself. “Not a dummy,” said Lottie, “we don’t call them dummies. Ventriloquial figure.”