My mother wouldn’t have seen Emily go down with a food tray to the garden room in the mornings, because Emily went down early, before eight, earlier than my parents got up. I imagine Emily took care at the end of the day not to go down again, to pick up his dishes, until my mother was no longer on the patio.

I don’t really know how everyone else felt that weekend. The children had a secret which they never told, for them it was a habit, an old habit, from early days, of not talking to their grandparents about politics. A habit they had picked up, as if by osmosis, from me and Howard.

Howard was his usual relaxed and preoccupied self, and he liked my parents. He enjoyed my father’s company, it was a pleasant weekend for him. Years later, here, he said once, out of the blue: the weekend your parents came? I knew, right away, which weekend he meant, how was it we never talked about it, yet it was so close to my thoughts, even then? My God, he said. We never talked of it again.

So I have an idea it was I, alone, who suffered that weekend. I don’t think I slept. I, who’ve often had trouble sleeping. I remember getting up and dressing, looking in my mirror, in the morning light. A pallor, again. I smoothed and brushed my hair. My mother commented, several times, on my pallor. I told you I’ve been under the weather, I said, fighting a cold. I drank a glass of orange juice that I had Emily squeeze, I never drank orange juice. Vitamin C, my mother said. But I don’t think she was convinced, or reassured.

I WONDERED HOW my parents’ visit disturbed Joseph. If it disturbed him. I imagined his days: still and quiet in his room, shadows from the trees and leaves falling on the stone floor, through the two small windows. His light on, he reading at his table. Reading, reading. Of course, he must be reading. Like a monk. I wondered what he’d be wearing, it was still summer. I knew his friends, his comrades, were taking and washing his clothes, and returning them. I had told Emily, one day, to ask if he had laundry. No, no, he said. My friends will do it. Emily told me this after. Perhaps Emily found it all as unsettling — as strange — as I did, but she didn’t say. Not then, she didn’t say then. In any case, I doubt Joseph had or wore many clothes, I mean, beyond a shirt, pants, his shoes and socks. I didn’t think further. He told Emily his friends would take care of his bedsheets and towels too.

Again, I pictured him. His reading. I felt kindred to him, perhaps he was like me. A solitary person, living in his own mind. I assumed his comrades brought him books and things he had to read, I knew, by instinct, that these were as important to him as the food Emily brought, every day. He was, indeed, like me.