Union Atlantic

chapter 13
Glenda Holland had decided it was just the thing to stay put in Finden on the Fourth of July and throw a grand party for all their friends and obligations. Jeffrey had canceled their plans for Capri, the Cape house was still under renovation, and Florida was out of the question in such ghastly weather. Besides, the Harrises were staying in town, the Finches, the Mueglers, the dreary board of the Historical Association, to which she had been dragooned into writing checks, and of course her wretched son and his prankster friends, and their parents for that matter, if they wanted to come - who was she, after all, to be embarrassed by her son's failure to crawl from the tub of even a public school? - in addition to which there was the advantage that as long as Jeffrey invited clients and a few shelves of Union Atlantic's management, the whole hing-ho could be charged up on the bank's entertainment account.

It being too late for save the dates, she'd gone straight to invitations, whizzing them out FedEx and doubling up the numbers. The caterer had to be bought out of a wedding contract, the tent people bribed, and the florist threatened with boycott. But by the time the real heat commenced that weekend before the Fourth, her chief suppliers had more or less fallen into line and the phone had begun to ring off the hook.

Starting late on a midsummer party, she'd expected half her list to have other plans but it turned out people were avoiding big-city crowds this year for fear of terrorist attacks and were delighted at the invitation. The chef was talking about a fourth boar and the temp agency hired to manage the parking said the field usually occupied by the sheep Jeffrey had purchased years ago to qualify for the family-farm deduction would have to be cleared away for the overflow. It all appeared to be coming together. Everything but the fireworks.

No one could be found to do the fireworks. Local governments had the firms all tied up in annual commitments and the big corporate parties had long ago been booked. Her assistant, Lauren, had scoured New England for anyone with a match and an explosive but come up dry. Finally, only days before the event, practically on her knees in the back of a restaurant in the North End, Glenda had managed to pry a nephew off the team for the Boston Pops show for a perfectly ridiculous sum of money and a promise to allow him to indulge his creative side. By the third, the house was overrun by staff, and Glenda retreated to the chaise in her bedroom, where Lauren took all her calls, while she hunkered down with a master guest list and the table charts. Spread on the coffee table in front of her was a map of the dining tent and a basket of little white pin flags onto which Lauren wrote the names of the guests as Glenda called them out.

After resisting her plan as belated, Jeffrey, once he sensed momentum, had in typical fashion reversed course, invited everyone and their accountant, and demanded certain pairings at dinner, leaving her a phone book's worth of Korean industrialists and German bankers, her knowledge of whose social skills was a virtual black hole.

"What on earth am I supposed to do?" she said, holding up table number twelve, trying not to move her lips and thus crack the teal mud caked to her face. "Put Sarah Finch next to some Brazilian sugarcane magnate? It's absurd. I try to get a few friends together and this is what he does to me."

With Jeffrey's secretary, Martha, weighing in on his behalf via speakerphone, whole armies of financiers advanced across the map from wasteland tables doubled up by the kitchen tent to the very borders of the social center, only to be beaten back again by Glenda's Sweet Briar classmates and a protective guard of village worthies airlifted into a kind of improvised DMZ ringing the single-digit tables of note. It was close quarters for a while, with Martha insisting the head of Credit Suisse and his wife could under no circumstances be expected to make conversation with the high-school badminton coach ("Mrs. Holland, the bank is paying for this, you realize?"), but with a few tactical retreats, Glenda was able to keep the ranker forces of tedium at bay, setting up Jeffrey at his own table with the absolute necessaries and forcing the remainder back to the periphery. By seven o'clock, once she and Lauren had tidied up the charts and sent them downstairs to the calligrapher for place cards, she was done for. A martini, a chicken Caesar, an Ambien, and two Ativan later, she was ready for a sound night's sleep before the big day.

When, shortly after dawn the next morning, the driver delivering the mobile air-conditioning units backed his truck into the last of the six black Escalades containing EverSafe International's full-event protection team, he found himself quickly surrounded by twenty-odd men in ill-fitting dark suits and wraparound sunglasses, wielding everything from stun guns to Glock 9s and shouting at him to get out of the vehicle, put his hands above his head, and lie facedown on the freshly sprinkled grass.

A year or so later, to the Hollands' minor cost and irritation, they would discover through their lawyers, before settling out of court, that the driver of the truck, a Mr. Mark Bayle, was in fact a veteran of the first Gulf War whose nearly cured PTSD had been massively reactivated by that morning's incident, causing him pain, suffering, anxiety, and eventual unemployment. At the time, however, the accident's most immediate effect was to whip Glenda, woken by the shouting, into a kind of pre-event seizure roughly six hours ahead of schedule.

If all Jeffrey Holland had been required to explain away that morning was how he'd approved the head of corporate security's recommendation for a complete vulnerability assessment, perimeter protection, and tactical team on his property without either noticing that he'd done it or informing his wife, he would have been in excellent shape. As it happened, however, the NASDAQ had closed at a five-year low on the Monday of that week; WorldCom had announced another exaggeration of profits, placing on life support the bank's single largest loan recipient; and to cap it off, on the afternoon of the third, the Massachusetts and New York attorneys general had announced a joint investigation of Atlantic Securities' favoritism in the distribution of IPO shares. In short, it wasn't shaping up as much of a holiday for Jeffrey. By the time an outraged Glenda bolted through his study door in her nightgown shouting about the thugs in the driveway, he was already an hour into a conference call with the general counsel and half the board, trying to account for internal policies he'd never heard of, let alone read.

By one o'clock the air outside had reached ninety-eight degrees, and many in the small army assembled to feed and entertain the Hollands' guests had begun to wilt under the pitiless sun. An assistant to the chef's subcontractor for the wood-burning ovens had fainted at his station, knocking his head on an ice chest and requiring removal to an air-conditioned bedroom at the back of the house. Trying to manage both her boss and the party, Lauren had set Glenda up on a couch in the library, where she could receive emissaries from the feuding vendors without either standing up or entering the furnace of the outdoors until both were absolutely necessary. The band claimed the caterer had done them out of electricity and the florist warned that if the technician sent by the air-conditioning firm to replace the traumatized driver didn't figure out how to operate the machinery soon her creations would wither and die. These, at least, were people in Glenda's employ. The fire marshal was another matter. While he'd kindly expedited her request for a permit for the show, upon inspection and discussion with the nephew in charge he had determined that the barge from which the fireworks were to be launched was floating at an insufficient distance from the shore of the pond, which would now need to be ringed with flame-retardant tarps.

"My God," Glenda exclaimed, sunken into the corner of the couch. "Have you no mercy? Can't you see what's going on out there? Flame tarps? Where in creation do you expect me to find those? Not to mention the fact that they sound hideously ugly. Couldn't we just give it a miss?"

The man, a stolid, bearded fellow in white shirt and epaulets glanced wearily at Lauren, who started searching her phone for the town manager's number.

"If you only knew what it took me to retain that young man. When I think of what I paid him. He could send his firstborn to college. I'm begging you," she said, managing another sip of her drink. "We did invite you, didn't we? You and your wife?"

Once Lauren had led the marshal from the room, Glenda decided that, all in all, the best thing might be to nap.

DOWN IN THE FIELD, a high schooler in red vest and bow tie pointed Evelyn Jones along an aisle of luxury sedans, and up against a barbed-wire fence. She applied her lipstick in the rearview mirror and then made her way through the parked cars toward a crowd of guests bottlenecked at the gate, where some kind of checkpoint had been set up.

"Glenda's gone too far this time," a silver-haired lady in front of her said to her husband, as security guards body-scanned each invitee with their metal-detecting wands. "Who does she think we are? Militants?"

"Believe me," the man ahead of her said, "there are people out there planning things. This here makes a good deal of sense." Evelyn recognized him from the newspaper: the head of State Street, lately plagued by kidnapping threats. Farther along, various bank employees and their spouses feasted their eyes on the chairman's estate, unfazed by the precautions. She supposed she was one of the few who wondered if she'd be allowed to pass. But they did let her through and she proceeded along the path to a set of long folding tables staffed by a team of severe-looking, young blond women who wielded their pens and clipboards like guardians of an auction for qualified buyers only, ready in an instant to lose those winning, welcoming smiles and halt the riffraff in their tracks. One of them beamed an extra beam as she checked Evelyn's name off the list and handed her a place card, her visage replete with that secret liberal pleasure of being given the chance to be kind and nondiscriminatory to a black person.

Up on the main lawn a waiter in a white jacket, sweat running down his face, offered her a glass from a tray of sparkling wines. Guests had already begun to roll up their sleeves and mop their brows with cocktail napkins. She strolled to the open end of the square formed by the back of the house and the two circus-scale tents and from there looked down the far side of the hill to a pond where several men in a rowboat were making their way toward a floating dock.

She'd known when Fanning routed her an invitation to the party not to expect barbecue in the backyard. But this was something else.

Then again, perhaps this was part of her new station. She was, after all, soon to be a vice president for operations.

Her aunt Verna had nearly fainted with joy at the news. "That's it," she'd said. "You go right on, you hear me? You just go right on." Verna had always been the pragmatist in the family, the survivor. Years ago, when she was a girl, Evelyn had asked her aunt how she managed to stay so thin all these years and she could still remember her saying, "Well, Evey, I'll tell you my little secret: there's nothing like good, old-fashioned anger to burn those calories to the ground."

What would Verna make of all this? Would she hesitate? Would she think it too much?

As soon as Evelyn had received the call from Fanning's secretary last week saying he wanted to meet, she'd expected a snow job. But a doubling of her salary? A position in management? The only other black woman in the upper ranks of the company was Carolyn Greene, a light-skinned Princeton grad, whose parents had a house on the Vineyard. At Evelyn's first minority-employee luncheon, Carolyn had asked her whose secretary she was. From the position Fanning had offered her, Evelyn could move to any bank in the country or into another line of business altogether. She could buy the house she'd long been saving for. And about one thing at least Fanning had been right: she would be better at the job than her boss.

You dream of such things with your brother fresh in the grave?

She could hear her mother's voice. Yes, she thought. I do.

Feeling a trickle of cooler air on her feet, she moved back along the tent's edge and passed inside. A giant chandelier had been dropped to encircle the main pole. Floral arrangements three feet high, bursting with red and blue, rose from the center of tables still being laid by a crew of waiters.

Nearby an older couple sat facing Evelyn, having taken refuge from the drinks tent opposite. He looked familiar, the gentleman, in his rumpled gray suit, his white hair neatly parted, his hands folded in his lap, a kindly look about him. Where was it, Evelyn wondered, that she had seen him before? And then she remembered. It had been back in the spring at the payment systems conference she'd attended down in Florida. He was the man from the Federal Reserve who had given the keynote address. She remembered it because such things were usually dull as all get-out. But toward the end of his review of the progress in securing commercial payments, this man had taken a step back from the specifics to describe to the audience the importance of their work, reminding them that while the business of keeping money flowing was a technical one, it supported and allowed millions of daily acts from the purchase of food to the paying of rent or salaries or medical bills. "Politicians argue over relative distributions," he'd said. "The market fiddles with the price of goods and labor. But all of it relies on you. You're the invisible medium. Not the hand of the market but the conduit. You touch virtually everything you see. Most of you work for private corporations. But the trust, it's public."

An old-schooler, she could remember thinking at the time. A man who sounded as if he meant what he said.

His wife - could that be the wife? - caught Evelyn's eye and smiled at her in a knowing fashion, as if they had just shared in some rarefied private joke.

Before Evelyn could say hello, the gentleman volunteered an apology if they were in her seats; she assured them that they weren't, explaining briefly about having heard him speak.

"Ah," he said. "I hope I didn't bore you. I can become rather self-important at times."

"That, at least, is the truth," the woman observed.

"This is my sister, Charlotte."

"How do you do?"

"All right, I suppose," she said. "Are you a banker, too?"

"I work for Atlantic Securities."

"Well then, you're in good hands," Mr. Graves said, with an open-faced smile, apparently not the least imposed upon by her approach. "This is quite a gathering," he added.

"It sure is. Not sure I really fit in," she said, chastising herself as soon as the words left her mouth. Why should she offer such an admission?

"For which you should count yourself lucky," Charlotte rejoined.

After Fanning's visit, Brenda Hilliard from compliance had phoned Evelyn back to ask what the issue was that she had wanted to discuss; Evelyn had prevaricated, saying there had been a mix-up, that the problem had been resolved. She had gone along with Fanning's scheme. That's what she had done.

"I didn't mean to interrupt you both," she said. "I just wanted to say I enjoyed your talk."

Mr. Graves smiled again. "You're very kind to say so. Enjoy the party."

___________

THROUGH THE FRENZY of the day's preparations, Nate and the others had sheltered around the Hollands' pool on the far side of the house. As usual on such idle summer afternoons, they'd gotten high and entertained themselves by playing bring-me-down, a game wherein the last things you wanted to think of while baked were hurled at you by your closest friends in an attempt to defeat your buzz. Each attack required retaliation and further bong hits, the whole disordered affair not infrequently bringing Emily to tears - of distress or drugged stupefaction one could never quite tell - while the boys more often resorted to throwing objects or shoving one another into the pool.

As surrogate families went, the four of them were tight-knit, having learned early on the value of ridicule as a means of avoiding the awkwardness of their mutual affection.

The game that day had begun with the minor stuff of yeast infections, poor hygiene, and other bodily insecurities before reaching personal matters - Emily's retarded cousin, Hal's inability to attract girls. And it might have ended there but for the stuff they were smoking. Having failed to graduate, Jason, on Hal's canny advice, had thrown himself on his parents' mercy, promised to rededicate himself to studying in the fall, and suggested that what he really needed was the chance to help others for a while. Thus it was that he'd recently returned from his week of Habitat for Humanity - in Jamaica.

What little he remembered of the experience, he recalled fondly. A nail-gun injury on the second day had put him on the sidelines of the actual construction, but he'd made the most of the company. The four jumbo tubes of Crest he'd emptied and stuffed with the finest of the local crop had sailed through customs at Logan in his toiletry bag and made it safely back to the house. Life since had taken on a new texture. Jason had hacked around on an electric guitar for years but it was only after returning from this trip, after hours of practice in the soundproofed basement, that he'd begun to realize just how outsized a talent he might be. Others had not fared so well. Interlopers to the gang of four had come, smoked, required Xanax, and fled. The first girl Hal had courted since sophomore year had wept in terror at the sight of the Hollands' tabby cat and demanded to be driven home. When seriously gotten into, the new stuff was an all-hands-on-deck kind of experience.

And so it came to pass that in the late stages of this particular session, at the point where someone usually threw in the towel and began agitating for food, reprisals instead intensified. Nate, coming to Emily's defense in response to the hit on her defective relative, went straight at Mrs. Holland's alcoholism.

"Oh, that's a good one," Jason said, sitting with bare, rounded back at the end of the diving board. "That's a real good one. It reminds me, I've been meaning to ask you, Nate, how's the widow? Your mother, I mean. The one who's sitting at home right now. The one who's going to watch the fireworks alone tonight. Ever think maybe you should spend a little more time with her?"

The question stung but the line of attack had been used before, hardening him to the sharpness of it.

"Whatever," Nate said, lying back in his deck chair. "You haven't been able to ejaculate since you started those anti-depressants."

Jason leapt to his feet and came around the pool to stand over Nate, his face flushed and shiny with bakeage. "You're a liar. At least I haven't been spending my nights on my knees sucking some stranger's cock."

"Jason!" Emily shouted, leaping up from her chair. "Shut the f*ck up!"

In this game, surprise was the only trump and Jason had played it. Nate had thought it would be safe to share his secret with Emily, but he'd been wrong.

"Interesting," Hal observed, crossing his legs and lighting another cigarette with which to enjoy this final round.

"I mean I knew you were queer," Jason said, "but senior citizens? Is that some kind of fetish thing? You like Daddy?"

"You are such a royal a*shole," Emily said.

"Come on, tell us. What does the old man taste like?"

"F*ck you," Nate said, picking up his book and towel and heading back into the house. Just inside the door of the Hollands' solarium, he paused, listening to the whir of the engines powering the Jacuzzi and the sauna and the air conditioner, the THC in his blood still burning down the cells of his brain.

He could go home if he wanted. But things were too real there, too slow. And what use would it be heading over to Doug's? Six nights in a row now he'd gone to the mansion at ten or ten thirty and, finding the lights out and no car in the driveway, waited by the side of the garage until eleven thirty or later. Most nights the sky had been clear, the trees on top of the hill by Ms. Graves's house visible in black profile against a dome of pinhead stars. Sitting on the cool grass, he'd wondered what his father would have thought of him, waiting there in the dark for this man. Or what he would have thought about the things Nate had done with Doug already. It was a habit of late, this guessing at his father's judgment of the things he did or said. Yet no matter how often he tried it, the result was always the same: it didn't matter. Nate wanted it to, but it didn't. Imagining his father's reactions was just an end run against his being gone, his having chosen to go. As if an endless hypothetical could keep him alive. The fact was, if Nate wanted to sleep in Doug's bed, no one but Doug could stop him. He was already that free.

With no idea where to go, Nate stepped into the back hall of the house. From the kitchen, a procession of waiters in black trousers and white smock shirts appeared, sliding past him, trays of wine balanced at their shoulders. One of them, a narrow-faced redhead with thyroidal eyes, spread his bulbous glance down Nate's bare chest like a cat stalking a bird, a lubricious grin playing across his lips as he sped by, leaving Nate feeling as alone as he ever had.

IGNORING THE PARKING minders trying to wave him in, Doug sped past the entrance to the field and turned right at the intersection, and then right again, winding his way around to the far side of the property. He'd attended plenty of the Hollands' parties over the years and was in no mood for one this evening, but his business with Jeffrey couldn't wait any longer.

All weekend, he'd camped out in a conference room with the door locked and McTeague on speakerphone, as they worked through each fabricated transaction until by Sunday night he'd assembled the full picture: Atlantic Securities, and not its supposed clients, held thousands of futures contracts obliging it to purchase Nikkei tracking shares at a price hundreds of points higher than where the Japanese index now traded. As they presently stood, McTeague's positions represented a loss of more than five billion dollars. With each further drop of the Nikkei, the loss grew exponentially.

For the moment, Doug had taken the only practical step: he'd kept McTeague in place and continued to funnel him enough cash to cover the margin and hold the positions open so the losses would remain, for now at least, unrealized. But he couldn't keep Holland out of the loop any longer. For one thing, Finden Holdings was running out of money to lend Atlantic Securities and would need more from Union Atlantic as early as tomorrow. More important, they had now reached a line over which Doug had no intention of stepping alone. Setting up a single-purpose vehicle like Finden Holdings to get around regulatory limits was one thing; it skirted rules without quite violating them. But what Atlantic Securities and its parent bank would have to do now to survive was altogether different: deception of the exchange authorities and the deliberate misstatement of the company's exposure to the shareholders and the public. Doug knew well enough how the principals defended themselves in investigations of this sort of thing. They did what Lay had done at Enron - claim ignorance of operational detail. Cutting the occasional corner might have been an implicit part of Doug's job in special plans, but he had no intention of letting Holland play dumb on a scheme this size.

When he saw the lights of the party through the trees, he pulled to the side of the road. He hadn't walked twenty yards along the fence when he glanced to his left and noticed a high juniper hedge, which seemed oddly familiar to him, almost as if he'd dreamt of it. Coming closer, he recognized the gap in the bushes and the white gravel drive. It was the Gammonds' house, where his mother used to clean, where he used to pick her up in the afternoons, its brick façade smaller than he remembered it, the shutters painted white now rather than dark green. He'd never come to the Hollands' from this direction and hadn't known this house was so nearby.

The sight of it brought him up short. Picturing the old lady in her jade necklace, a moment he hadn't thought of in years came back to him, an exchange they'd had the last time he'd come here.

She had asked, as usual, how school was going, but instead of giving his standard curt reply, he'd told her what he hadn't figured out a way to tell his mother - that he was leaving, going into the navy. No one else but the recruiter had known, not even his cousin Michael. He had wanted to shock the old lady, to show her that he was more than her cleaning lady's son. But she hadn't been the least surprised. "Good for you," she'd said. "My father was an admiral, commanded the Second Fleet during the war. He always had tremendous respect for the enlisted men."

A trowel in her gloved hand, the skin of her face a fine, tan wrinkle, those heavy stones and the little silver rings that separated them hanging around her neck.

Why hadn't she given him away, he wondered now. When his mother approached, Mrs. Gammond had said nothing, made no congratulatory comment or aside, as if she'd known the news was a secret. She'd just smiled and waved goodbye.

She had been elderly back then; by now she would be dead and gone.

Putting the matter aside, he kept walking up the street, looking for a gap in the fence. Stepping into the field, he strode through the tall grass, making for the house.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a figure moving quickly toward him in the twilight.

"Hold it there," the man called out, "you can't come in this side." He hustled up to block Doug's path, all suited six-three of him, complete with an earpiece and a flag pin on his lapel.

"Get out of my way," Doug said.

"This is a private party, sir, if you - "

"I pay your f*cking wage!" he shouted, pushing past the goon.

___________

HE FOUND HOLLAND coming down the steps of the terrace, a crystal tumbler in hand.

"We've got a problem," Doug said. "We need to talk."

"Well, gosh, thanks for the news flash. I've been dealing with it all morning. Bernie f*cking Ebbers. How much money did we lend that guy? And now that showboat Spitzer is after us. Like we're the first people in the world to do our clients a favor? He's a politician for Christ's sake, he does favors for a living. But oh no, the party in the market is over, right? And the people want their sacrificial lambs. The script's as old as Teddy Roosevelt, and if we're lucky it'll be just as toothless. But they'll want cash and that's the one thing we don't have right now, thanks to you." He emptied his glass. "So yeah, you're right, we've got a problem."

"Let's go inside."

His shoulders slumping, Holland turned back up the steps and led Doug down the hall and into his study. Closing the door behind them, Doug leaned his back up against it.

"We're in trouble," he said. "More than we thought."

As Doug explained what McTeague had done, Holland's head moved up and back, as if tapped on the nose by a boxer. When it sunk forward again, his mouth was half open and he looked dazed.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "No."

At which point, the door handle nudged Doug in the small of his back and he stepped aside to watch Glenda enter. She wore a red silk dress with blue pearl buttons and across her chest a spray of diamonds.

The Adderall she'd taken following her nap had mixed with the drink to give her the novel sensation of being simultaneously drunk and highly efficient.

"Hello, Doug," she said, unsteady on her feet. "How are you? I was so sorry to hear about Judge Cushman's decision. But I'm sure you and Charlotte will work it out, won't you? Now Jeffrey, you need to come with me. Did you notice we have three hundred guests in the yard? Come along, come with me."

She motioned with her index finger as a parent might to a child.

"Where the f*ck is Lauren?" Holland asked no one in particular, and certainly not his wife.

"She's doing her job, dear. Now it's time for you to do yours. Come along."

"Jesus, Glenda," he said. "Hold it together, would you? I'll be there in ten minutes. Just get out there and deal with it. And for Christ's sake stop drinking."

Glenda turned to Doug and smiled. "So good to see you," she said. "You really are so handsome. And my husband keeps you all to himself." She rested her limp, sweating hand on his wrist. "Be a darling. Bring him out to the party, won't you?"

Like a luxury car with poor turning radius, it took some effort for her to steer back through the door, which Doug closed behind her.

Across the room, Holland stood with his back to the bay window, his face drained, all his bluster gone. He could put on exasperation about WorldCom and Spitzer and all the other difficulties; he could even enjoy them, the way they lent him the air of the embattled leader, comfortable all the while in the knowledge that in the end the bank would take a few write-offs and move on. Companies with bloated stock prices could now and then go belly-up, but everyone knew the biggest banks just kept marching.

"We give McTeague to the authorities," he said, reaching for conviction. "That's what you do. We fire him, close out his positions, and put out a statement."

"Are you out of your mind? We'd lose half our capital base overnight. Our customers would run for the doors. Not to mention trigger a crisis. You're not thinking straight. We're talking about survival. And not just for this company. You've got a responsibility to that."

"Who the f*ck are you to talk about responsibility?"

"Come on, Jeffrey. Is this how you're going to play it? Throw your hands up, get some cheap ethical high, and spend the next three years in depositions?"

"Is that a threat?"

"Don't be ridiculous. The point is, you're letting the situation get to you. That's not how it has to be."

"Oh really? And what do you propose?"

Doug had never seen him so frightened. Most all of what Holland had achieved in life had flowed from the bottomless well of his self-confidence, a great, social largesse that made everyone in his orbit feel as if they'd been selected for the bright and winning team. Contemplating a failure of this magnitude undid the premise of him.

"We keep feeding him money for now," Doug said. "We keep the positions off our books, on his phony clients. And we wait. Sell what and when we can and wait for the rest to turn around. We keep our nerve. That's what we do."

"That's your plan? Double the entire bank down on a single bet and hope for the best? I expected more out of your scheming mind."

"You have another idea?"

"Fraud. That's your answer? You're suggesting we commit fraud? You want me to stand up at the shareholders' meeting and with all the other great news add that things are going fine and dandy in foreign operations?"

"It's your call," Doug said, wandering over to the bookcase. "We can sell. I can call Hong Kong right now. If you're lucky, you'll get to retire with some fraction of what you've got and be remembered as the guy who built a powerhouse and ran it into a ditch. And once they start digging and reporting and trying to understand what really happened - and they will - the shareholders will sue you anyway, and maybe the Feds will too. That's one option: be the upstanding guy. But that's not the advice you hired me to give you. I'm here because you wanted to win."

Doug took down from the shelf a vintage leather-bound edition of de Gaulle's memoirs only to find that the pages remained uncut.

"You know what I've been thinking lately?" he said.

"I shudder to think," Holland said.

"About how things are changing. The old compact. Between government, companies, the news. The basic assumptions about how everyone behaves. Most people have some vague sense of it. They feel a kind of undertow and they're scared by it. But they don't see how fundamental the shift is. They don't see it because they're too busy surviving or lamenting whichever piece of the old assurances they happen to be losing. So they get sentimental, wishing the tide wouldn't come in. At least that's what the losers do. You can do that. Or you can admit what we've always been up to. And then you can focus on the bigger picture."

"And what might that be?"

"Influence. Power over information. Control. Something bigger than rules or good taste. The more permanent instincts. You know what I'm talking about. You even get off on it. It's just the appearance of it that bothers you."

"You're a piece of work. You really are."

"You think you get all this for free?" Doug said, gesturing at the paintings and the antique furniture.

"Who the f*ck do you think you are? Free? I was making loans before you were born."

"Sure. And every year the interest rate got better, didn't it? Government caps came off, and you could charge twenty-five percent on Joe Six-Pack's credit card, and get him to pay you for the privilege of keeping his money."

"What are you? Some kind of Socialist now?"

"I'm nothing," Doug said. "I'm just saying, you take the advantage you can get. That's how you got what you have."

"Yeah, with one difference. It was legal."

Doug smiled, leaning back against the bookcase. "That's right," he said. "And the governed have consented and all is well in the hearts of the people."

Holland sank onto the bench in the window, all his fretful motion spent. As he stared over the darkened field from where Doug had come, the two of them listened to the sound of trumpets from the tent outside, their high, shiny notes rising on the night air.

EARLIER, AS CHARLOTTE and Henry had approached the gates, they'd been confronted by the expressionless faces of the guards.

Don't be fooled, Wilkie whispered. They're not here to protect you. And I know what you're thinking - that it's always a conspiracy with me. But just remember, they said I was paranoid, that I'd invented all that business of a plot against my life, but you know now how the FBI listened in on me, how they followed everything that went on in the Brotherhood, and I'm supposed to believe your white government didn't know there were gunmen there at the hall waiting to kill me? You've been uppity, Charlotte. You've thwarted one of their kind. Now watch, he said. They will take your protectors from you.

And so they did, insisting the dogs be tied up to a tree. No animals allowed. They would be given plenty of water, they said, the more barrel-chested of the two claiming to be a lover of dogs.

You come to Sodom and leave your minister tethered at the gate? Sam asked, despairingly, his pompous head thick with sweat. God's grace may be infinite, woman, but to think that He should give us help against sin without our asking and crying and weeping to Him for His help; to think that God should save us and we never set apart any time to work out our own salvation. What reason have we to believe such things? God is in Ill terms with you. He visits you not with His great consolations. Despite what you think of your victory, all things are against you; the things that appear for your Welfare, do but Ensnare you, do but Poison you, do but produce your further Distance from God.

God is a character, Charlotte thought, as she handed the leashes over to the men. A well-rounded character in a well-rounded book.

And she and Henry continued on up the hill, the ministers' voices fading behind them.

Just three days earlier, after her vindication had been called out from the judge's bench for all to hear, she had taken Henry for a walk up to the nursery to pick out saplings for planting once the mansion had been leveled. But all he could summon was a barely disguised disappointment at the result, as if returning five acres to their property and nature's way were more burden than triumph. Sam and Wilkie, however, had been the larger disappointment. All spring she had calmed herself with the thought that once the strain of arguing her case was over, the dogs would relent. After all, it was for them, as well as herself, that she had fought so hard to beat the intrusion back.

Instead, their berating of her had grown incessant, their talk traitorous, reminding her that in siege warfare, it didn't matter how high or thick your city walls were if the enemy's agents were within.

And so just when she'd thought she might at last turn her eye to the future, Charlotte had found herself once more having to call up memories in defense: how quiet it had been in the woods, say, on a late afternoon in August as the thunderheads gathered and you could see up beyond the pale evergreen and birch, where against the powder-gray sky the black-and-orange wings of butterflies danced in the last shelves of light, fair creatures of an hour that she might never look upon more.

                                 - then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

"They were the same age, you know?" she said, as Henry glanced into the drinks tent.

"Who?"

"Keats and Eric. When they died. Twenty-five. Though of course Keats had written a good deal more and of much finer quality. But there we are. Correspondences - they keep you company."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"No, I don't expect you do."

"Over here," he said, leading them across the way into a second, quieter marquee, this one artificially cooled and full of elaborately set tables. He pulled out two chairs for them to sit.

"Why on earth did we come here?" she asked.

"You were invited, remember? By Glenda Holland."

"Ah, yes. The woman who's trying to pull the ladder up behind her. She thinks siding with me and the Historical Association will somehow absolve her of her wretched taste."

"Why is that woman staring at us?"

"Which one?"

"That black woman over there," Henry said. "In the beige dress."

"I haven't a clue," Charlotte said.

Eventually, the woman approached. Apparently she'd heard Henry pronouncing on something or other down in the swamps of Florida.

Once she had left, Charlotte examined the place card in her hand. The number one was written on it in elaborate script. A very fine pen had been used to make such a mark, she thought, the ink strained through the nib to near perfection, not seeping at all into the crevices of the linen paper. A quick, sure stroke. You would have such place cards at a wedding. And tables like this. Eric's family being Catholic, the ceremony would have been important to them. Who wouldn't like it to look as it had for Henry that day he danced with Betsy on the parquet?

In what dim hollow of her mind, she wondered, had such fantasy never died?

Guests began filtering in for dinner. A bass drum sounded from the stage, followed by the heraldic notes of horns, as the assembled musicians struck up Fanfare for the Common Man.

"I've always rather liked this piece," Henry said. "You remember Daddy used to love Copland."

"I suppose he did."

"With the record player in the window. Out on the porch. You remember."

Late Sunday mornings with the newspaper and the breakfast tray and Charlotte in one of her blue cotton dresses and afterward their father would go back into his study and keep working. The never-ending work on behalf of the People. The work of justice conducted in the dependable medium of statute and brief.

The second burst of horns ceased, followed by a bar of silence and then again the low rumble of percussion.

"It's just the right sort of optimism," Henry said. "Confident without the swagger."

"But isn't it amazing," she said, "what context does. The emigre Socialist homosexual cheering on the New Deal. And yet what becomes of Copland here? Pure bombast. Congratulations for pirates."

"I'm just saying it's a good bit of music."

"Well, it's certainly a simpler world if you can cabin things like that. One discreet experience after the next."

"For Christ's sake, can't you give it a break? I didn't have to come up here, you know. It's not as if you enjoy my company."

"Oh come on, Henry, there's no need to revert. We're not playing house. I say these things because I think you understand them and most people don't. I'm sorry if it sounds like criticism. It's just conversation, as far as I'm concerned. I know you want to help me. I appreciate that."

"Then why don't you tell me what's going on?"

"How do you mean? We won. The law did what it's supposed to do. I would think you'd take some satisfaction in that."

"I don't mean about the land." He watched a few familiar faces - the head of State Street, the head of Credit Suisse - coming through the entrance of the tent with their wives. "How am I supposed to say this? You're my sister."

"Ah. I see. You think I'm losing my mind."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. You meant it."

"You're barely eating," he said. "And the way you talk to those animals of yours."

"I knew it would come to that: the old lady and her pets. But the world's bigger than you think, Henry. It always has been."

"Meaning what?"

"Do you imagine Betsy is entirely dead?"

"Charlotte, please. Give the woman a little respect."

"That's precisely what I'm doing. I'm not talking about ghosts. I'm saying she's not entirely gone. Not in you."

"Of course not. I have memories like everyone else. But as they used to say in college, that's ontologically trivial. Not to mention which, she's got nothing to do with your dogs."

"Well, there you are. You ask me what's going on but you don't actually want to know. Not unless you already understand it. There's a lot of that going around at the moment - your kind of certainty."

"Oh, come off it. Don't try to make this about politics."

"Like I said, it's a much simpler world if you can separate things out like that. History's a bit of a problem for you on that account, but then who am I to question the wisdom of the age? You're no doubt efficient."

Guests assigned to the table where the two of them had perched began arriving to take their seats, smiling cautiously in Charlotte and Henry's direction.

"Come on," she said. "Let's get this over with. Where are we sitting?"

"Table one, apparently. I suppose they've put me with Holland."

"Well then. Time to dine with your captors."

As they walked toward the center of the room, Holland waved them over.

"Henry, I want you to meet Doug Fanning, head of foreign operations and special plans. He runs everything around here. Doug, this is Henry Graves, president of the New York Fed."

For a moment the two of them beheld each other in disbelief, Henry watching his own shock reflected in Doug's face, whose eyes had gone wide with amazement.

"Do you know each other?"

Before either could reply, Glenda appeared with Charlotte on her arm and proceeded to nudge Henry to one side.

"My husband is such an awful dunce. Of course they know each other, dear. Doug and Charlotte are neighbors. Don't you listen to anything I say? Now," she said, pulling out the chair beside Doug's. "You're right here, Charlotte. I've put the two of you side by side so you can have a good long talk. If you get to know him, you'll see Mr. Fanning is an absolute sweetheart. And the fact is, Doug, that house of yours is a bit ugly. Nothing that a good hedge wouldn't solve."

Before Henry could intervene, Glenda grabbed him by the arm and led him around to the other side of the circle.

THROUGH THE salad course and the first glass of wine, Doug and Charlotte sat in silence, the volume of conversation around them growing steadily louder. Having got what he needed from Holland - verbal approval at least - Doug had tried to leave but Glenda had returned to drag him and Jeffrey into the yard.

How perfect, he thought now, how absolutely perfect that Charlotte Graves's brother should be the president of the New York Fed, elected by a club of his colleagues, half from his alma mater no doubt. What could be more establishment? It made sense of her hubris - imagining herself a guardian of good order.

Before that courtroom charade, she had been an irritant. Now she was a problem. Judge Cushman's order couldn't be allowed to stand. Doug had already talked to Mikey about how to proceed. According to the public record, the Graves Society was a financial mess. They would attack the charity. If they could kick the struts out from under that, her argument would crumble. But they would need documentation faster than she would ever produce it.

"So!" she said, addressing herself to the silver-dipped roses at the center of the table just after their dinner plates had arrived. "Where is it you suppose you'll go come September? A neighboring state, perhaps?"

Emptying his second glass of wine, Doug lifted his fork from the table, wondering how quickly she would bleed out from a stab to the heart.

"You were a schoolteacher, right?"

"That's none of your business. But yes, I was."

"Do they have mandatory retirement these days? Or was there some other reason you had to leave?"

"It's incredible to me, Mr. Fanning, that a person could be quite so transparent as yourself. One imagines that adulthood comes with some minimum of complexity. You had one of your minions look back over the local paper, did you? Learned of my travails? How intrepid of you. Perhaps you already know, then, that my subject is history. Most of my fellow teachers, and the textbooks for that matter, presented the material as if it were a simple record, a kind of newscast to be placed in front of the young, for what reason these days no one's particularly sure, beyond a few nostrums about not repeating ourselves. But that's not the tack I took. I was a little more opinionated than that. I had the temerity to suggest that certain developments in human society were better or more dangerous or more evil than others, and I'm not talking about your standard twentieth-century horrors, the ones they throw in for free. I'm talking about people like you. The despoilers. The patriots of capitalism. Given the ubiquity of your type these days, is it any surprise they forced me out?"

Doug took a breath to calm himself and said, "I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you knew the Gammonds."

"Herb and Ginger?" she said. "Of course. They were lovely people. Have you bought their land as well, then?"

"No. When I was a kid I knew them. My mother used to clean their house."

"Is this some kind of joke?"

"No. I grew up in Alden."

"I see," she said, examining his face in earnest, considering this new fact. "I know what you see when you look at me. An old whatsit crying, 'Not in my backyard.' That's what you say to yourself about what I'm doing. A crone who wants her trees back. Which I do. But I have to take my stand where I can. You probably won't believe me when I say that it's not personal, but it isn't. I suppose I have allowed myself to think of you as a villain, but really it's not you I despise. For all I know you're a Democrat. It's just what you stand for that I can't abide. And I'm not so naive as to think that running you off that land will solve the bigger problem, but at least I will have done that.

"I wonder, Mr. Fanning. If you were to see a lone soldier fighting an army, what would you think of him? That he is a fool? Or that he simply believes in his cause?"

"Neither. I'd say he was going to lose."

"Right. Because that matters more than anything to you, doesn't it? Dominance. That's the childish pleasure you people can't get enough of. You get your fix dressed up in a suit, but it's no different than a drug. You're angry. And once the men like you start this war of theirs, people will die by the thousands to cure that feeling in them."

"In my experience, killing doesn't cure much."

She raised her head, turning her ear to listen to something over the din of the party. "Do you hear that?" she asked. "Do you hear barking?"

"You need to understand something," he said. "You haven't won anything. You just haven't lost yet."

"What have they done with them?" she cried, standing abruptly from the table, straining to hear some phantom noise. "Henry," she called out, bringing a halt to the table's conversation, the bankers and their wives staring at her in polite alarm. "Henry, where are they?"

RELEGATED to the children's table, Nate and the gang had waited what seemed an eternity before the fat-slathered pork and spareribs finally arrived. They set to gorging and in no time at all their plates were clean and cleared and peanut-butter parfait topped with American flags on toothpicks appeared in front of them.

"I can't take this music anymore," Jason said. "We need to get out of here." He rose without pushing back his chair, causing his knees to slam against the underside of the table and spill multiple water glasses before he fell again into his seat.

Eventually, they roused themselves and headed out through the broiling kitchen tent, past a swarm of short, dark people scraping half-eaten dinners into heaping garbage pails, the taller black waiters staring blankly at the tips of their cigarettes, as the head man popped the corks of the champagne. "On the trays!" he shouted, as the four of them slipped through an opening by barrels of melting ice.

"It's hotter than a jungle out here," Hal said.

Spotting a guard lounging at the gate in his shirtsleeves, they tacked rightward toward the trees in front of the house. That's when they heard growling and the rustling of chains. Jason jumped sideways, falling into a rose border.

"Dogs," Hal said.

Walking nearer, Nate recognized Wilkie and Sam. "Weird," he said. "They're my tutor's."

"That's deep. What do they teach you?"

Their bowls were empty and they looked up at Nate with sad, gaping eyes.

As the others drifted off, he untied their leashes and shooed the two of them up onto the terrace and into the house. Adjacent to the kitchen was a kind of cat apartment with carpeted walls, wicker bassinets, and in one corner a forest of dangling string. Way too large for this feline retreat, Wilkie and Sam knocked about like vandals in a child's room, their bulky heads clearing windowsills of teak brushes and padded collars, Sam ripping strands of twine from the mobile with an impatient yank of his jaw.

"Chill out there," Nate said, looking through the cabinets of tinned salmon and prescription drugs for something more substantial. Finding nothing, he opened as many tiny cans as he could into the miniature bowls before the dogs shouldered him aside to get at their supper. He fetched them water and sat for a moment on the chair in the corner, watching their glistening tongues lick the steel clean.

And then their heads were up again, eyes still brimming with hope.

"That's it, guys. Sorry."

They sniffed at the cat baskets, rummaging in search of their inhabitants.

"Stay here, okay? Just stay."

He pulled the door ajar and crossed back through the kitchen, heading out into the front hall, wondering where Ms. Graves might be. Here and there on decorative chairs and benches guests had taken refuge from the heat and the crowd, an older couple dozing upright on a chaise longue, a Japanese businessman in a tight black suit tapping away at his BlackBerry, while a few feet behind him a gaunt woman in a sweat-stained silk dress ruminated on a painting over the fireplace.

Heading up the stairs, Nate paused on the first landing, from which three hallways ran off into different wings of the house, each painted a different color, one beige, one pale blue, one dark red. The others had likely retreated to the third floor, back up to Jason's room, which could only mean more bong hits and combat, a prospect he didn't relish just now given how forcefully his retinas continued to pulse to the beat of his heart.

Stilled there on the landing for a moment, he found himself slowly drawn to the pattern on the wallpaper of the blue hallway. Little indigo diamonds were set on an azure background and surrounded by tiny gold stars each in turn ringed in a halo of silver, the design stretching on uninterrupted by picture frames or light fixtures, as if decoration of this particular wing had gone unfinished.

Coming closer, he could see another pattern beneath, stamped in outline onto the paper itself: hexagons contained within octagons contained in circles, which were themselves woven of figure eights, each figure only an inch wide, the stamp repeated a thousand times over. Moving from background to foreground and back, his eyes roved up and down, left and right, searching in vain for a place to rest, for something to comprehend or analyze, but he could find nothing, no larger, central figure or meaning, forcing him eventually to give up and simply let the pattern enter him unconceptualized, the whole ungrasped, which strangely enough, after a few moments, produced an oddly pleasurable sensation, a kind of relief from the responsibility to understand, at which point he moved in a step closer losing all lateral perspective, as when he'd lost himself in the endless zigzag of the houndstooth check of his father's overcoat as he was carried half asleep from the backseat of the car up to his bedroom as a boy, pressed against that endless repetition. The sudden memory of which he now condemned as sentimental. Thus covering self-pity in self-punishment, both of them equally false, both of them walls thrown up to block the view of something hopelessly vaster.

He kept on down the hall, coming to the open door of a bedroom done up in nautical style with powder-blue curtains and a navy bedspread and a replica of an old ocean liner set in a glass box on a table between the windows. At the bedside table, he picked up the cordless phone and dialed.

It rang three times, as it always did, before his mother answered, her voice rising gently on the last syllable of "Hello?"

"It's me," he said. "I'm over at Jason's. I told you, right? His mother's having this party."

"Is she? Oh, good. Have they given you supper?"

"Yeah. They've got these tents set up and everything. Are you going to watch the fireworks?"

"Oh, I'll probably put the TV on later. I suppose they'll be starting soon. It's a good night for them."

"I'm sorry."

"What for?"

"That I'm not there."

"Don't be silly. I'm fine. I'm just catching up on the paper. There's a wonderful piece about walruses with the most amazing pictures. Such odd-looking creatures and they sing these incredible songs to one another. I'll cut it out for you."

"I could come home if you want."

"Nate, don't be silly. I'm fine. Are you staying the night?"

"I might."

"Well, enjoy yourself."

"Did you put the air conditioner on?"

"Oh, no, it's so loud. I hate the sound of it. I've got the windows open and there's a bit of a breeze."

"Mom, you should turn it on. It's broiling."

"It'll cool down."

"Well ... I guess I'll see you tomorrow?"

"All right, then. Good night, dear."

He put the phone back in its cradle, aware all of a sudden of the quiet.

"Nate? What are you doing here?"

He turned in wonder to see Doug already halfway into the room.

"Jason Holland," he finally sputtered. "He's my friend."

"Jesus. What a mind-f*ck this party is. Where the hell did Glenda put the bathrooms? I've been looking all over."

"There's one right there," Nate said, pointing to the far end of the room.

When Doug had gone inside, Nate instinctively rose to shut the door to the hallway, his heart sprinting, imagining what would happen if Jason or one of the others were to wander in here now. Slowly, his breathing came under control. He tucked his shirt into his shorts and ran a hand through his hair, wishing he'd had the chance to shower after swimming and sweating out in the yard with the dogs. In the mirror, the fabric bunched now at his waist looked queer so he untucked his shirt again and tried pulling his shorts lower on his hips.

When Doug stepped back into the room, Nate noticed that he was pale, as if he hadn't slept. Strangely, the exhaustion seemed to have removed from his face a layer of his usual indifference.

"So you know the Hollands?"

"Yeah," Doug replied. "I know them."

"I stopped by the house a few times. Have you been away?"

"I've been busy."

The thrill of being alone in a room with him again seemed to make everything else fall away. What would it matter if someone did come knocking at the door? This - between them - this was about what they wanted. Not who the desire made them.

Trying to hide his erection, Nate took a seat on the edge of the bed.

Doug paused to inspect the replica of the ocean liner.

It was the SS Normandie. Just over a thousand feet, according to the brass plaque. As long as an aircraft carrier, with a draft as deep, and likely capable of a similar speed, thirty knots or so, complete with the ballrooms and the luxury suites. Such a classy, elegant profile, she had, the stuff of postcards. Capsized dockside in the Hudson, if Doug remembered correctly, and sold for scrap.

"Glenda's crazy," he observed. "She thinks she's some kind of duchess."

"Mrs. Holland? Yeah. She's a weird cook too."

"Let me guess. You're high as a kite."

"No - I mean, not really. We smoked earlier but - "

"I need a favor," he said, examining the fine thread braided into a miniature length of rope and coiled on the ship's foredeck. "In the old lady's house. There are papers, records, lots of them, I'm guessing. I need as much about the case as you can get. Are you going to do that for me?"

"I thought it was over."

"No. We're just in a new phase."

He came over to stand in front of Nate. A couple of weeks earlier he'd gone so far as to agree to go to a movie with the kid, even though he knew it would only feed his fantasy of the two of them as actually together. Nate had dressed up in pressed chinos and an ironed shirt; he'd even polished his shoes.

To be that innocent, he thought.

He looked up at Doug with such tender hope.

"What do you want from me?" Doug asked. "You want me to f*ck you?"

Nate blushed. "Why are you being so harsh?"

"That's what you want. Right?"

When he tried to stand up Doug put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him down again; he turned to face the wall. Looking at the kid's profile, it occurred to Doug how easy it would be to take his head in his hands and with a quick twist of the neck, kill him.

"I swear to God," Vrieger had said to him once, "I wish I had stabbed every one of those passengers to death. At least then I'd know what we did to them."

"You think I'm an idiot," Nate said. "You think just because I keep coming to your house you can say anything you want to me. I'm not as weak as you think. I've been through stuff."

"Okay. Fine. But here's the question: Are you strong enough to tell me what you want? That's the test, in the real world. I told you what I want. I want those papers."

He reached out and cupped the back of Nate's skull in his hand, pressing his thumb and forefinger into the taut muscles of his neck. Slowly, reluctantly, Nate leaned forward, letting his head come to rest against Doug's stomach.

"What if I want to tell you that I love you?"

"You don't love me. I make you hard, that's all. Which is fine. The rest is daydreaming. But don't worry," Doug said, running his hand through Nate's hair. "I like you."

"Really?"

"Sure. Why not?"

DAISIES AND MILKWEED and high summer grass scratched at Charlotte's ankles and shins, catching on the hem of her dress as the crickets and frogs all about her in the field sang in endless oscillation.

They can't have gone far, she thought, how far could the dogs have gone? Lights from the party died away at the woods' edge.

"Samuel!" she called into the blackness, dotted here and there by fireflies. "Wilkie!"

Mosquitoes swarmed at her head and along her bare arms she could feel the tingle of gnats. The air itself seemed to sweat, the pores of every living thing opening wide, sap bleeding from the pines, the bushy arrowheads of the grass stalks bursting to seed, the whole warm earth breathing in the darkness.

Her temples still throbbed from the receding cacophony of voices and music. She'd focused as best she could talking to Fanning, as she always tried to in the presence of others, holding fast to the teleological mind, that once broad current that flowed past the lacuna of doubt and random transport. But those organizing arguments dropped away again here.

Stepping into the woods, she reached her hand out and felt the smooth bark of a birch.

"Come along," she called out to them. "Come along."

She could barely see her hand in front of her face, the darkness molten now like a closed eyelid's slow swirl.

Why search? Such pedants and moralists Sam and Wilkie had become. Yet as soon as she imagined being without them the feeling of loneliness bit at her. She had been nearly cured of that disease before they had come along. She had been content in solitude. Her soul kept alive by the leaps of incandescence that now and then hallowed intervals otherwise inconsequent: the rhythm of words singing off a page, a sonata turning time into feeling, a landscape on a canvas so caught as to grant one brief respite from the fear of total neutrality. These were the body and blood of her faith in the world. What the utilitarians and the materialists and the swallowers of all the cheap scientism would never understand: that the privilege of walking by the river in nature's company owed as much to a mind trained by poetry and painting - of Protestant plainsong or Romantic largesse - as to any quiddity of nature's own. You walked through the painting. You saw through the poem. Imagination created experience, not matter alone.

"Wilkie!"

If they went too far they might reach the road, where they could be hit by a car or cut their paws on glass.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard a young woman's cry. She turned, seeing nothing but darkness behind her. All of a sudden, there was a terrible beating of wings and she felt the stiff tips of feathers brush against her arm as a bird took off right beside her, a crow by the sound of the call it made as it veered up and away. She began walking more quickly, her breathing growing heavy again, the back of her dress soaked through with sweat. Roots protruding from the ground and the low branches of the pines made the going hard. Just as she saw what she thought were lights up ahead, she felt a sharp nick on her leg and shifted to her right to avoid it only to feel another stab on her wrist. Frightened, she reached her arms out in front of her, and started moving faster still.

THE GUESTS, stuffed and drunk, had at last been herded out onto the lawn for the fireworks, the flush-faced town collegians on break from summer internships grabbing their third or fourth glasses of champagne as the foreign investors trailed after them remarking to themselves that no matter how weak the dollar or poorly managed the public fisc, really you couldn't beat the States for all the sights to see. And there, teetering on a riser overlooking the pond stood Glenda Holland soused to the gills, trying to shush the players who'd already struck up the opening largo of the 1812 Overture.

Hal, for reasons he couldn't later recall, had been in search of twine and a shovel when, at about this time, he flipped the switch on the garage-door opener. The panicked sheep fled as if from the abattoir, waddling at a clip across the drive, bleating as they went, only to be penned again between the tents, driven into the rear of the gathering crowd, who turned in astonishment at this sudden outbreak of the agrarian. When an EverSafe Security employee drew a semiautomatic from under his jacket and held it down toward the shaggy, neglected creatures, a vegan sophomore from Vassar standing nearby cried "Terrorist!" at the top of her lungs. No sooner had she uttered the word, than champagne flutes were tossed aside and crushed under foot as the guests toward the front, blind to the nature of the threat, were sickened by the sudden knowledge that their decision to avoid city crowds had failed to deliver them from danger, and with no other direction to go they hurried down the slope into the grass, scattering toward the woods and the pond and roadway. Others closer to the incident merely returned to their tables, baffled as to the origin or meaning of the episode. For a while, mild chaos reigned, Glenda trying desperately to conscript the guards as shepherds, while some of the younger and more inebriated guests, amused at the folly, began feeding the sheep the remainders of the peanut-butter parfait. Nerves shot, the animals began shitting profusely, on the grass, on the dance floor, on the feet of exhausted partygoers, who sent up new cries, the stink thrown off by the steaming piles mixing with the stale scent of the machine-cooled tents to give what remained of the gathering the air of a barnyard in autumn or early spring.

Emerging onto the terrace, Nate encountered a ewe working a drainpipe loose with the scratching motion of her tubby white flank.

"You!" a man in a baggy gray suit called out. "Have you seen my sister?"

"Shit," he said, recognizing Ms. Graves's brother from one of his visits to her house. "I'll find her."

It seemed to take forever to wade through the milling crowd. Eventually, he managed to circle around to the parking area, where by the gate he finally saw her. She walked stooped forward and with great effort. When he reached her he saw she had bright-red scratch marks lined all up and down her arms and legs and one across the side of her neck.

"Ms. Graves, the dogs, they're inside, they're fine. It's my fault. I wanted to feed them."

Tears welled in her eyes, though her kindly, pained smile never faltered.

"These people don't clear their underbrush," she said. "There's a nasty patch of briars in there. A few hours with the clippers is all I'd need."

Lending his arm for support, he walked her slowly up the path.

"What on earth are you doing here?" she asked. "Don't tell me these people are your friends."

No sooner had he found a chair for Charlotte back up on the lawn than Mrs. Holland once more ascended the little riser, waving her arms and calling out to whomever remained to please, please, hurry up and watch. The bleary faces of a few stalwart celebrants turned just in time to see the barge on the pond explode in one single, hammering burst, the flames from the blast shooting twenty or thirty feet into the air before dripping back into the water like burning fuel, and so too over the dry grass, which began at once to burn.