As the door closed, the boy sat down on the piano bench and began to play the opening chords of La Cathédrale engloutie. He touched the keys lightly, bending close over his hands as though afraid to attract the attention of the silent chess players in the corner.

Chapter 2

“How can there be a beginning?” Fern asked. “You’re born into someone’s life. You’re carried along, a nothing, flotsam. My first independent action, my own true beginning, was to join the party.”

Max closed the book from which he had been reading aloud and placed it between them on the front seat. Fern’s driving, frightening in the city traffic of Los Angeles, was now, on this country road, merely negligible. He had asked her twice to stop riding the brake pedal. Her short-fingered hands in their white gloves rested on the steering wheel with a tentativeness toward machinery he characterized to himself as feminine. Male chauvinism, he supposed. Yet he was touched by the gloves. She was wearing them because of the convention, the way a woman wears gloves to church—hands hidden from the Lord.

“What does he say?” she asked irritably, poking one finger down at the book. “That his birth was the first of his misfortunes? Sentimentality!”

“Because it cost his mother’s life,” Max said.

“It may have been his first luck,” she snapped back.

“Take your foot off the brake.”

The stubborn foot slid off reluctantly.

“You break away if you can—if you can,” she said. “I haven’t yet. Last week I was to Redlands. As soon as I walked in, my mother started up about the earthquake. That was eleven years ago. Then about the child that was murdered, her head stuffed into her schoolbag, and that was seven years ago. An earthquake and a murder! That’s my harmless little bourgeois mama! Anything to stop me from talking! I just mentioned the Spanish refugee camps in France, and she began to tremble. I could see her fingers shaking, and my father went out into the yard to play with his damn lemon tree! But God! I fall back into the same old rituals. I clear off the table after dinner as though I were beating the devil to the sink. You think we could sit around the table and have a proper, serious discussion? No! Joan Crawford’s divorced again or remarried or something. My stomach is a wreck. I tried to stop my mother from teaching my little niece that ghastly prayer—she’s only two—you know that prayer? ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray—’”

“There’s someone up there ahead. See? Sitting up against a tree,” Max said. “Fern, stop tormenting yourself about your family. Everyone’s got one.”

“It’s my weakness. I can’t stop thinking about them.”