“Nathaniel, you are the eldest,” she said, in a voice grown cold. “Now please tell me, did your mother say that I disliked your father and forced her into eloping?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I shall take your word on that. Andrew, you should take care the things you say. Take care not to speak falsehoods, especially about your own mother.”

“I’m not a liar,” he mumbled.

She leaned toward him, cupping an ear.

“I said I’m not a liar, ma’am.” The trembling lower lip, the injured expression. Before Nathaniel could stop him, he blurted out, “Nat told Eliot and me that he had a talk with Mother awhile back and that she said you made her run away to get married, because the only thing worse than marrying our dad would’ve been to marry a Negro.”

Even for Drew, this was a stunningly obtuse thing to say, Nathaniel thought, as Aunt Judith looked at his youngest brother for a long time, or what in that hot oppressive quiet seemed like a long time; looked more in grief than in anger.

“Am I to be a policeman, interrogating you to find out … Oh, never mind. Elizabeth’s silence answers the question. My, oh, my, what a wonderful impression you three must have of me.” She folded her napkin and creased the fold and opened and folded and creased it again, and Nathaniel saw in her what he had seen so often in his mother—jaw muscles twitching as her will sought to subdue her emotions. “But that impression did not stop you from coming here to ask for money, did it?”

“No, ma’am! I mean, we didn’t come here for …”

“Oh, please, Nathaniel. I’m very old, seventy-five this year, but I am not a fool. I do want you to know that I was so delighted to see you three, to see you at last, that I would have lent you five times as much if you had asked it.”

“Aunt Judith, we didn’t think anything bad of you, honest.”

“Don’t fret. I’ve no intention of withdrawing my promise. I have my honor, and I can look at the loan as my way of repaying you for explaining, even if you didn’t mean to explain, why your mother has shut me out all these years. She was afraid that if … Better to cut herself off entirely …” This with a slashing motion. “Perhaps I would have done the same in her position, but I don’t think I would have gone to the length of setting my children against the woman who raised me, and more—saved me. No, I don’t think I would have done that.”

“She didn’t set us—” Nathaniel started, but the raised palm, pale and cracked, stopped him again.