Back from his first, lengthy meeting at the BBC, the promise of a contract for The Calm practically in his pocket, Ted wore an expression of blank confusion, unable to process the scene: his little desk in the vestibule cleared, and books and paper everywhere, everywhere—loose, in pieces, in little bits, floating over his shoes as he stepped through the front door. And Sylvia simply standing at the end of the red hall. It was a puzzle, anagrammatic, with some kind of unthinkable meaning. It was red and white and black.

Each page, each poem an image, a facet in the pattern of her reality, a mirror—Lady Lazarus, Ariel, the beekeeper’s daughter, Sylvia.

“It says POTS, Mummy,” Sylvia said, holding her mother’s hand at the intersection, across from the entrance to Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. “It says POTS!” Aurelia was watching for traffic to pass, her baby son, three months old, only loosely wrapped in his carriage due to the muggy Boston summer. She glanced over at her small daughter, following Sylvia’s finger pointed excitedly up at a STOP sign. Sylvia was reading. She was two and a half.

Shifting, revealing the nuanced shimmer, the gleam of meaning from another angle as the whole, like a world, revolves. A knuckle’s strained pallor, or a shoulder polished by the sun.

Arms folded in judgment at the end of the hall, she ransacked his face for signs of lipstick, red smears on his collar. He looked confused. Her imagination flew into hyperspeed, light-years past the sudden senselessness of what she’d done, searching for justification, excuse, anything but recognition of the pattern hidden among all those scraps of paper, their black words, the red walls keeping them from blowing out into infinite space. “You’re late,” she said.

What’s black and white and read all over?

“No-no, Sivvy,” her mother corrected, holding Sylvia back from the armchair where Aurelia nursed the new baby. Willful, passionate for her mother’s lap, especially now that it was occupied by another child, Sylvia kept her bare leg hitched over her mother’s knee, her leather Mary Jane dangling at the armrest, waiting for her mother to relent. Her soft sandy hair neatly brushed to the side and tied in a floppy satin ribbon, Sylvia stared into her mother’s face, her expression one of cherubic determination, a grave irreplicable oneness. “No-no, Sivvy,” Aurelia repeated, pointing toward a convenient distraction. “Bring Mummy the newspaper, darling. Let’s play alphabet. Can you find me an ‘A’? That’s a good girl!” Watching her mother’s flat smile, her swift infant imagination seeking the pattern, the parting of the rustling curtain, Sylvia let her leg slide slowly back down.

The parting of the rustling curtain … The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.