By Nightfall

“Hello, boys.” She walks in with the milk Mizzy will need in his morning coffee and the two bottles of extravagant cabernet they’ll all drink tonight. She brings the vitality of herself—her offhand sense of her own consequence; her perfectly careless jeans and pale aqua sweater and the nape-length tangle of her hair, which is going wiry with its infusion of gray. She still carries herself like the pretty girl she was.

Is it the Taylor curse to peak early, is there some magic in that decrepit old house that fades the moment they leave it?

Kisses and greetings are exchanged, one of the wine bottles is opened. (Should Rebecca be serving wine to a drug addict, what’s up with that?) They go and sit in the living room with wineglasses.

“I’m going to ask Julie to come up next weekend,” Rebecca says.

“She won’t,” Mizzy answers.

“She can leave the children for one night. They’re not babies anymore.”

“I’m just saying. She won’t do it.”

“Let me work on her.”

“I don’t want you to have to work on her.”

“She’s going to drive them crazy. Those kids. It’s not even about them, it’s about Julie being the greatest mother who’s ever lived.”

“Please don’t force Julie to come to New York. I’ll go see her.”

“No, you won’t.”

“One day I will.”

Mizzy sits cross-legged on the sofa, holding his glass in his lap as if it were an alms bowl. He is, no denying it, another Rebecca, but it’s more about incarnation than it is about resemblance. He’s got her youngest-one ease, that sense of unquestioning self-possession—Behold me, the promised child. He’s got her tilt of the head, her fingers, her laugh. He isn’t tall—five nine, probably—and his body is compact, sinewy. It’s not hard to picture him sitting disciple-ishly at the edge of a holy garden. He does, in fact, look a little like one of the swoony Renaissance Sebastians. He has those waves of mocha-colored hair, those pinkish white, sinewy arms and legs.

Peter hears his name.

“What?”

Rebecca says, “When did we go see Julie and Bob?”

“I don’t know. Eight or nine months ago, I guess.”

“Has it been that long?”

“Yeah. At least.”

“It’s hard to feel all that enthusiastic about going down to D.C.,” she says to Mizzy. “And spending the weekend stuck with them in that monster house.”

“I’m a little scared of the house, too,” he answers.

“Are you? It isn’t just me, then.”

Peter drifts out again. It’s catch-up, it’s Taylor-talk, he can’t be expected to stay tuned. He watches Rebecca lean in toward Mizzy as if she were cold and he gave off heat. All three sisters insist on Mizzy as their familiar, their daemon, the one in whom they can confide about the irregularities and infelicities of the other two.

Mizzy does, in fact, possess a certain aspect of disembodiment. He’s a little spectral; he feels like a fantasy he’s having, his own dream of self, made manifest to others. That’s surely due, in part at least, to a childhood spent alone with Beverly and Cyrus in that big house, as Beverly grew worryingly neglectful of domestic particulars and Cyrus, who turned sixty the same month Mizzy turned ten, lived increasingly in his study, the only refuge from the amassing evidence that his wife’s eccentricities were hardening, with age, into something darker. The girls came when they could, but they were starting lives of their own. Rebecca was at Columbia and Julie was in medical school and Rose was engaged in her epic battle with her first husband out in San Diego. What must it have been like for Mizzy, who came too late to the party; who spent his adolescence in barely lit rooms (thrift having become one of Beverly’s fixations) among the leavings and artifacts? On a visit there when Mizzy was sixteen, Peter wrote his name in the dust on a windowsill. He found a very old dead mouse behind the ficus in a corner of the living room, scooped it into a dustpan, and disposed of it secretively, as if he hoped to protect the Taylors from some feared diagnosis.

Mizzy. It’s hardly beyond understanding, neither the straight A’s that led to Yale nor the drugs that led elsewhere.

If anything, he looks to have come through surprisingly well, in the fleshly sense at least. When he was a little kid he was slightly odd-looking, but as he grew older a sharp-faced handsomeness manifested itself almost as if it had been called down for protection, as a fairy godmother might bestow an enchanted cloak on a troubled prince. Girls, or so rumor has it, started calling before he’d turned eleven.

Rebecca is saying, “… and into the great room, which is what she calls it, with a perfectly straight face.”

Mizzy smiles sadly. He does not, it seems, take the same sour pleasure in Julie’s bourgeois tumble, her uncritical embrace of things enormous and immaculate.

“I suppose she feels safe there,” Mizzy says.

Rebecca isn’t having it. “Safe from what?” she says.

Mizzy simply looks at her, questioningly, as if he’s waiting for her to resume her natural form. His color is deepened by discomfort (Rebecca really is on a tear about Julie, hard to say why), his eyes gone glisteny and black-brown.

Peter says, “From everything in the world, I guess.”

“Why would you want to be safe from the world?” Rebecca asks.

Rebecca, why would you be looking for a fight?

“Pick up a newspaper. Turn on CNN.”

“A castle in the suburbs isn’t going to save her.”

“I know,” Peter says. “We know.”

Rebecca pauses, gathering herself. She’s obscurely angry—she herself probably doesn’t know why. Mizzy has upset her, reminded her, made her feel guilty of some crime.

Peter risks a glance at Mizzy. Here it is again, that flash of secret affinity. We—we men—are the frightened ones, the blundering and nervous ones; if we act the skeptic or the bully sometimes it’s because we suspect we’re wrong in some deep incalculable way that women are not. Our impersonations are failing us and our vices and habits are ludicrous and when we present ourselves at the gates of heaven the enormous black woman who guards them will laugh at us not only because we aren’t innocent but because we have no idea about anything that actually matters.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Rebecca sighs. “I just hate it that she’s gotten like this.”

“Most people do,” Peter says. “Most people end up wanting children and nice houses.”

“Julie is not most people.”

Hm. Another of those impossible marriage-moments. Feign agreement, or risk implosion.

“Most people think they’re not most people,” Peter says.

“It’s different when they’re your sister.”

“Got you,” Peter says. He knows how to arrange his face.

Your sisters and brother are all still alive, aren’t they? Don’t you think I’d love to be able to sit here and complain about fat old Matthew and his not-very-bright boyfriend and the bratty adopted Korean child they refuse to discipline?

It’s unfair. Of course it’s unfair; unseemly, even, to stop an argument by trotting out your dead-brother credentials. But there shouldn’t be a squabble, not on Mizzy’s first night.

Question: Does Rebecca want a fight precisely because she knows Peter’s unhappy about the visit? They can take that up later. Also the question about serving wine to a former addict. Or they can just get tipsy on the cabernet, and go to sleep.

Rebecca says, “I forget, was it a Shinto or a Zen shrine?”

Mizzy blinks, twice, in the glare of the beam that’s been aimed at him. “Um, Shinto,” he answers.

And there, on his face, is the clearest of convictions: I don’t want to be a monk and I don’t want to be a lawyer but more than anything I don’t want to end up like these two.