when I was a kid.”
“Wow. Nerdy.”
“Yeah. I was a late bloomer.”
“Here’s a long one I need to get. Twelve down: One deeply devoted to wine.”
He thought for a moment. “Sommelier.”
She counted down with a fingertip, shook her head. “Not enough letters; you need eleven.”
“I wish you would have told me that.”
“Sorry.”
“Try… connoisseur.”
“Nope. There’s a gimmick this week: the answers all start with the first letter of the clue. So ‘one deeply devoted to wine,’ it has to start with an o.”
“Again, that would have been really useful information about twenty seconds ago. You’re making it hard for me to help you, Molly.”
“Just trying to keep you humble.”
He finished his coffee and put down the cup. “It’s oenophilist.” She gave him a skeptical frown, so he spelled it out. “O-e-n-o-p-h-i-l-i-s-t. Oenophilist. Wine lover. The o in the beginning is silent.”
She filled in the letters one by one, her lips pronouncing them soundlessly and precisely as she wrote, eyes darting to follow the hints provided by each new entry. It occurred to him that he could have happily watched her do that simple thing all day long.
“I would have gotten that,” she said quietly.
“You know, if you like word games so much I might have a better job for you down at the office.”
She put down her pencil, but kept her eyes on the paper in front of her.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something,” Molly said. She got up and took his empty plate and silverware to the sink.
“Okay. Let’s talk about it.”
“I’m not going to be in town very much longer.”
“Why?”
“I’m just not. There were some things I wanted to do here, and I’ve done them now, so I’ll be leaving.”
He sat back. “When are you thinking of leaving?”
“Soon.” Her attitude had changed abruptly, as though she was steeling herself for a discussion she didn’t want to prolong.
“Look, I didn’t mean anything when I mentioned a job, I know how you feel about that place-”
“You didn’t say anything wrong. This is just the way it is, okay?”
“Okay.”
She’d busied herself in silence in the kitchen for a little while, rehanging pans and tidying up briefly, but soon she sat down across from him again, reached over, and put her hand on his.
“Cheer up,” Molly said. “Go get ready, and loan me a jacket. I think we should take a walk.”
When he came back dressed from the bedroom he found her at the table again with a framed sheet of his childhood schoolwork in her hands, reading it over.
“What is this?” she asked.
“That was a penmanship exercise, from the fifth grade.” He pulled up a chair and sat beside her. “I don’t even think they teach that anymore, do they? Penmanship?” She tilted the frame a bit so they could both see it clearly. “They asked us to write down something we liked, obviously as neatly as we could, and that was my dad’s favorite poem, the last bit of it anyway.”
In the upper corner was the first gold star he’d received at his new school, near his new home, in the year that everything had changed. One of his nannies had framed the paper to commemorate the occasion. The movers placed it on a vacant desk in the study when he got this place, but he was certain he hadn’t looked at it a second time within those years. And it wasn’t quite right to say it was his father’s favorite poem; more like the old man’s justification of his life set in verse. He’d directed his young son to study it so he’d always know the way things really worked in this world.
Noah picked it up, let his thumb brush the dust from the corner of the glass, and read each metered line aloud.
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled,
and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled
and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up
to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back
to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and
no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror
and slaughter return!
When Noah had finished they sat in silence. Seeing these words again seemed to have taken something out of him. Molly must’ve sensed the change as well. She took the frame from his hands and laid it on the table.
“Who wrote that?” she asked.
“Rudyard Kipling, in 1919. Not one of his better-known pieces. He’d lost his son in the war and his daughter a few years earlier, and I guess he wasn’t so happy with the way things were starting to go in the world. This is only the last few stanzas of the poem; that’s all I could fit on the page.”
“Pretty heavy stuff for a ten-year-old.”
“Yeah,” he said. “The Jungle Book, it’s not.”
“And what do you think he was telling you with this, your father?”
“He told me the poem meant that history always repeats itself, that the same mistakes are made over and over, only bigger each time. The wise man knows that if you can’t change that, you might as well take full advantage of it. But to me it meant something else.”
“And what’s that?”
“It’s a warning, I guess, about what happens when you forget common sense. You have to read the whole thing to get it. I think it means that there really is such a thing as the truth, the real objective truth, and people can see it if they’ll just look hard enough, and remember who they really are. But most of the time they choose to give in and believe all the lies instead.”
“I’ll bet your father was disappointed to hear that coming from his own little boy.”
“You know,” Noah said, “if I’d ever had the guts to say it to him, I’m sure he would have been.”
Getting outside turned out to be a good idea. Noah was still aching from the thumps he’d taken the previous night, like the random pains you feel only in the days after a rear-end collision, but the cold city air and exercise were relieving a good bit of that.
They’d talked some along the way, though for the most part it had been a quiet walk. But there was nothing tense or self-conscious in those wordless stretches. He found himself at ease in her company, as if a conversation was always in progress, only spoken in other forms. She stayed close to him, at times with an unexpected gesture of casual intimacy: an arm around his waist for half a block, a finger hooked in his belt loop as they crossed a busy street against the light, a palm to his cheek as she spoke close to his ear to be heard over the din of the traffic.
At Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue she gradually slowed her pace and then stopped just outside the
