“I meant too young to know, to feel.… What’s the word I want? Assaulted. Assaulted by events from the outside. By history, an ugly history. Turn on the radio, there it was. The TV, there it was. Open the paper, there it was. Try to have a civil dinner conversation at home, there it was. Lord, that one summer we all got together up at Mingulay. When was that? ’Sixty-seven, ’sixty-eight? Allyson teaming up with your cousin Warren, your father and I and Jason on the other side, and all of us screaming at each other. Thought it was going to come to blows right then. All that public history just barged into our private one and warped and exaggerated everything and—” He stopped in midsentence, then added in a lower tone: “Ever since then, it seems that things haven’t been quite right in our family. I’m not talking about only the miseries I guess every family’s going through these days. The plague of divorces …” Both hands raised—a plea to her that he meant no criticism of her decision. “Or the screwed-up child here or there. Or the odd case of addiction. It’s that we don’t take the joy in one another that we used to. Oh, we still get together and exchange all those long Christmas letters, but something’s missing. Is it joy? Love? Or are the joy and the love missing because of something deeper missing? Some fundamental belief in ourselves, perhaps?”

“Myles, as far as I’m concerned, things haven’t been right since Hilary died. Twenty-nine years ago, this past Labor Day. Twenty-nine years, two months, and nine days.”

“You never have gotten over it, have you?”

She was silent for a while, thinking, She would have been forty-nine this year. Hard to picture the golden girl as a middle-aged woman.

“No, I guess I haven’t,” she answered finally. “And what happened to her didn’t have a thing to do with the sixties or the war. It had everything to do with my father and—”

The clock tolled four and there was a light tap on the door: Maria, the live-in nurse’s aide who saw to Myles’s needs and soothed his pains and put up with his spells of irascibility like a tolerant wife.

“Time for your checkup.”

Bearing stethoscope, blood pressure gauge, and a vinyl bag containing a clean catheter and plastic bladder, she slipped into the room, her child-sized sneakers making a mousy squeal. She was a Filipina only a couple of inches taller on her feet than her patient was sitting down, but she had a stature and a presence vouchsafed by her strict air of competent authority.

“Take your medications at three?” she asked, with a kind of gentle severity, and set her things on the window seat, beside a tray upon which a phalanx of squat brown prescription bottles guarded a plastic water pitcher.

“Which one?”

“Blood thinner.”

“Forgot.”