you lose. He was a winner, I was a loser. Like my mother.”
“You seem to me very like your father,” she says. “Sharp-minded and courtly and sad.”
“Courtly! Me?” Lowell laughs. He looks curiously at his reflection in the dark plate glass behind the bar.
“He could be so gentle,” she says. “It’s not true that he never showed his feelings. He was always sad. Always haunted.”
“He was haunted,” Lowell agrees. “My mother did that. You know she left him for another man before the … I never forgave her. They were both on that plane.”
“No, I didn’t know,” she says. “You mean they went down together, your mother and her—?”
“Not down. You know the details. The hijacking, the explosion.”
“Hijacking?” she says, leaning forward, avid. “I don’t know details. I hardly know anything. He’d never—He just said she died in an airline disaster.”
Lowell is stunned. “September ’87,” he says. “Paris to New York, the nerve-gas hijackers—”
“Oh my God. That hijacking.”
“Air France Si—I can’t say it. I’m superstitious about the number.”
“No survivors.” Elizabeth presses her hand against her lips. “Isn’t that right?”
“Except for the children.”
“Oh, the children, that’s right, I remember now. I remember seeing those poor little children on TV.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t know.”
“No. Nothing. He’d never say a word about the past. I’ve always been curious.”
“Look,” he says uneasily. “It isn’t something I can talk about.”
“No, of course not. I’m sorry.” She plays with her wineglass, puddling spilled wine with her finger. She draws an S in the liquid on the low table. “Was the man’s name Sirocco? The man your mother left him for?”
Lowell frowns. “It was Levinstein. Violinist.”
“Who was Sirocco?”
“I have no idea.”
“He was tormented by Sirocco,” she says. “He used to cry out in his sleep.”
“My father?”
“He never mentioned Sirocco to you?”
“Doesn’t ring any bells. Mafia, maybe? They gathered intelligence on all sorts.”
“What exactly was Mather’s role?” she wants to know.
“I never exactly knew. Not precisely. Gathering information and misinformation and deciding which was which, I suppose. He was a spook, and then after the hijacking, when he stopped junketing all over the planet, he trained spooks. That’s all I know. Maybe he still did other stuff too, I really don’t know. He used to say someone has to do the dirty work to keep the country safe. I never got much more detail than that.”
“Nor did I,” she says.
“When I was little, he was always flying off to talk to ‘contacts’. He’d never tell us where, but I’d pick up clues, you know. He’d bring back presents and say, Got it in a bazaar in Cairo, or, The wives of the camelmen in Afghanistan make these. Stuff like that.”
“We never traveled anywhere by plane. He wouldn’t let me fly alone either.”
“Planes spooked him after ’87. Plus I think, you know, he was pushed into semi-retirement. I think they were afraid he was losing it. Kept him in Washington.”
“There used to be a car and a driver,” she says. “Every day. And then suddenly, no more official limo, and he had to use his own car. Mostly he shut himself up in his study with his computer and his books.”
“They put him out to pasture,” Lowell says. “Short life span in Intelligence, he always said that.”
“It gnawed at him,” she says. “It wasn’t just the nightmares. Sometimes he would disappear all night. Just driving round the city, I think.”
Lowell stares at her.
“I could tell from the mileage,” she says. “I’d check the odometer. He could put in fifty, sixty miles in a night.”
“I told you he was a stranger to me. I knew the mailman better.”
“There was no one I could ask about it,” she says. “Everything’s classified, or else that was his excuse.”
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” Lowell says. “I know the routine.”
“He said if I mentioned anything to anyone, our lives were in danger. I never knew whether to believe him or not.”
“I never knew either,” Lowell says. “This calling out in his sleep … did he do that often?”
“Toward the end, every night. Arguing with Sirocco. Shouting at him. Or with Salamander. That name mean anything?”
“Not to me.”
“They stalked him. They terrified him. Especially Sirocco.”
“I guess I suspected he was losing it. But he kept such a tight hold on himself.”
From the pocket of her black suit jacket, she takes the gardenia that Lowell gave her at the graveside and holds it in the palm of her hand. The edges of the petals have turned brown. She reaches for Lowell’s hand and opens it and places the gardenia in it. “And now we have both lost Mather,” she says. “Permanently.”
At that point, he is able to cry; well, not cry, exactly, not cry in any luxurious or extravagant or consolatory or even noticeable way, but he does become aware of functioning tear ducts, of a physical sense of swollenness, of overflow which moves him profoundly. The fact of grief moves him, as of some precious thing long mislaid. He is overcome by this reentry into the experience of emotion per se, and he thinks of it as an atmosphere emanating from Elizabeth. She drives him back to the airport and he wears dark glasses and stares out the window all the way.
“You could stay the night, Lowell,” she offers.
He turns then, but does not remove his dark glasses. They sit for some time, not speaking, on the fifth level of the airport parking garage. When she turns the key in the ignition, as though agreement has been reached, he says, “Thank you, Elizabeth, but I can’t. Rowena says Amy and Jason will panic if I don’t get back tomorrow, and I know she’s right. The kids … you know, I have a bad effect on them, but they need to see me. They need to know I’m okay. I promised I’d take them to the Public Garden tomorrow.”
“You will need to go through your father’s things,” she says,
