By Nightfall

was always waiting. Julie was less stunning but more easily amused, a one-of-the-guys girl, loud and funny, a champion gymnast, unapologetically sexual. And then there was Rebecca, born famous thanks to her two older sisters; Rebecca, who was small and pale, gamine, the least beautiful but most intelligent; who had the same aloof, guitar-playing boyfriend since the eighth grade; whose girlhood is epitomized (for Peter) by the yearbook photo in which she, wearing the homecoming crown and holding homecoming roses, stands laughing (who knows why, maybe at the absurdity of where she finds herself) in a little sparkly dress, flanked by the two runners-up, the princesses, who smile mightily for the camera, and who are slightly stolid in their beauty, unremarkable, descendants of those sturdy “marriageable” girls in whom Jane Austen was not particularly interested.

And then. When Rebecca was about to graduate from high school, when Julie was in her second year at Barnard and Rose was already thinking of divorce, the Mistake arrived.

Beverly had had her tubes tied years before. She was forty-five; Cyrus was past fifty. Beverly said, “He must have been desperate to be born.” This statement was taken seriously. She was an expert on children, a doctor of children, and not prone to romances about them.

Peter had met Mizzy when Rebecca brought him for the first time to Richmond. He was nervous about meeting her family, embarrassed over the putative note of impropriety—wasn’t it a little creepy for a graduate student to date an undergraduate from his seminar, even if he had waited until after the semester’s end? Rebecca’s father was a professor, could Peter really and truly believe Rebecca when she assured him that her father didn’t disapprove?

“Just shut up,” she told him as the plane descended. “Stop worrying. Right now.”

She had that intoxicating, young-girl certainty; she had that Virginia lilt. Jest stop warying. Raht now. She might have been a nurse in a war.

He promised to try.

Then they were off the plane and there was Julie, vital and friendly in a cowgirl way, waiting for them outside the airport in the family’s old Volvo.

And then, there was the house.

The photo Rebecca had shown Peter had prepared him for its decrepit grandeur—its tangles of wisteria and deep, shadowy front porch—but not for the house in situ, not for the shabby wonders of the entire block, one lovely old matronly house after another, some better cared for than others but none done over or restored—it apparently wasn’t that kind of neighborhood; Richmond probably wasn’t that kind of city.

“My God,” Peter said, as they pulled in.

“What?” Julie asked.

“Let’s just say it’s a wonderful life.”

Julie lobbed a quick glance at Rebecca. Oh, right, one of those very, very clever boys.

In fact, he hadn’t meant to sound cynical, or even particularly clever. Far from it. He was falling in love.

By the end of the weekend, he’d lost count of his infatuations. There was Cyrus’s study—a study!—with its profoundly comfortable swaybacked armchair, in which it seemed you could sit and read forever. There was Beverly’s applauded (if failed) attempt to impress Peter by baking a pie (which was known afterward as “that goddamned inedible pie”). There was the upstairs window through which the girls had escaped at night, the three lordly and lazy old cats, the shelves crowded with books and elderly board games and seashells from Florida and framed, rather haphazard-looking photographs, the faint smells of lavender and mildew and chimney smoke, the wicker porch swing on which someone had left a rain-bloated paperback copy of Daniel Deronda.

And there was Mizzy, about to turn four.

No one liked the word “precocious.” There was something doomy about it. But Mizzy, at four, had figured out how to read. He remembered every word he heard spoken in his presence and could, forever after, use the word in a sentence, often as not correctly.

He was a serious and skeptical boy, prone to occasional fits of hilarity, though it was impossible to predict what might or might not strike him as funny. He was pretty, pretty enough, with a high pale forehead and liquid eyes and a precise, delicate mouth—it seemed at the time that he might grow up to be a beautiful princeling or, equally plausibly, a Ludwig of Bavaria, with a great dome of vein-mottled forehead and eyes too full of quivering sensitivity.

And (thank God) he harbored childish affections and inclinations along with his spooky proclivities. He loved Pop Rocks and, with an unsettling devotion, the color blue. He was fascinated by Abraham Lincoln, who Mizzy understood to have been president but who he also insisted had possessed superhuman strength, and the ability to conjure full-grown trees out of barren ground.

That night, in bed (the Taylors, it seemed, just assumed), Peter said to Rebecca, “This is so incredibly lovely.”

“What?”

“All of it. Every single person and object.”

“It’s just my crazy family and my creaky old house.”

She believed that. She wasn’t being coy.

He said, “You have no idea…”

“What?”

“How normal most families are.”

“Do you think my family is abnormal?”

“No. ‘Normal’ isn’t the right word. Prosaic. Standard.”

“I don’t think anyone is prosaic. I mean, some people are more eccentric than others.”

Milwaukee, Rebecca. Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing their best to live decent lives, there’s nothing really to hate them for, they do their jobs and maintain their property and love their children (most of the time); they take family vacations and visit relatives and decorate their houses for the holidays, collect some things and save up for other things; they’re good people (most of them, most of the time), but if you were me, if you were young Pete Harris, you felt the modesty of it eroding you, depopulating you, all those little satisfactions and no big, dangerous ones; no heroism, no genius, no terrible yearning for anything you can’t at least in theory actually have. If you were young lank-haired, pustule-plagued Pete Harris you felt like you were always about to expire from the safety of your life, its obdurate sensibleness, that Protestant love of the unexceptional; the eternal certainty of the faithful that flamboyance and the macabre are not just threatening but—worse—uninteresting.

Is it any wonder Matthew got out of there two days after he graduated from high school, and had sex with half the men in New York?

No, don’t do that, it’s poisonous, it’s wrong, Milwaukee did not kill your brother.

Rebecca said, “If you grew up here, you’d probably feel a little less romantic about it all.”

“Then I want to feel romantic about it all for as long as I can. Mizzy told me the story of Abraham Lincoln, before dinner.”

“He tells everybody the story of Abraham Lincoln.”

“Which he seems to have mixed up with Superman and Johnny Appleseed.”

“I know. He has to make a lot of it up as he goes along. We’re all gone, and Mom is a little, I don’t know. Over it. She loves him to death. But she could barely manage the maternal bit the first time around. When I was little, it was Rose and Julie who read me stories and helped me with my homework and stuff like that.”

“Julie doesn’t like me, does she?”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. A feeling, I guess.”

“She’s protective, is all. Which is funny. She’s the wild one.”

“She is, huh?”

“Oh, probably not so much anymore. But in high school…”

“She was wild.”

“Uh-huh.”