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section of Time magazine) had made some kind of mess of his last will and testament—apparently he’d written two versions. Th e newer one turned the mansion and everything in it over to Sylphide, but every penny else, including the rights to his songs—a vast fortune—went to Linsey, with specific instruction that the boy be remanded to the custody of his grandmother (so much for Kate’s theories about the matter), Dabney’s blighted mother back in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where Dabney himself had famously worked as a coal miner into his early twenties, writing his heartsick songs at night.
    It all happened instantaneously after Dabney was dead: Linsey was flown to England under escort and in a firestorm of publicity. Th ere were photos in the Daily News, photos in Newsweek, photos in Th e Saturday Evening Post, editorials (all of them arguing for the return of the beloved boy to his stepmom); there were the dancer’s ever-so-gentle public queries about the motives of her in-laws and ungentle countercharges (which sounded, in fact, a lot like Kate’s ideas, all wrong: the dancer was a piranha, a gold-digger, a careless parent, a fake). Th e legal system, immune to the great ballerina’s delicacy, her magical kindness and obvious honesty, oblivious of her inability in grief to dance and so make a living (my own take on the matter), froze all assets indefinitely, so that she couldn’t even sell belongings to pay for daily life.
    And after a season without funds, the High Side was visibly in trouble. Sylphide, we knew from Th e New York Times, had had to let go the High Side’s groundskeepers, cooks, maids, drivers, and finally the famous little butler. From my bedroom window I could see that th e glorious gardens were overgrown. T he vintage Bentley sagged in the driveway under a layer of old rain-patterned pollen and acorn caps. Th e daily deliveries of food and liquor and flowers and the streams of guests had stopped.
    After a long look at Dabney’s old album cover—a really long look, that nymph both fleeing and beckoning, that exquisite form, that open, angelic face, that dancer’s derriere —I ferried our lawn mower across the pond in Dad’s aluminum rowboat (the closest he’d gotten to his dream of a yacht). On the far bank I unloaded quickly, set to work mowing, stopping often to clear the discharge gate on the machine, my fingers turning green. I pulled my shirt off, paced the great, dewy expanse of lawn, a whole sweaty morning in hot sun. If nothing else, I was getting a workout. I pushed the mower, I daydreamed, I made my way toward the mansion, stripe by stripe of lawn, more and more intricate as I got closer. In a tremendous sugar maple growing inside their walled garden, I spotted the remains of a tree fort Kate had often mentioned, a leafy palace for the kids of the Chlorine Baron, the industrialist who’d built the High Side during the Roaring Twenties on his profits from industrial chemicals and home cleaning products, also the poison gases used by the enemy in World War I.
    Th e front yard was ornately planted. I made my way around the rhododendrons and azaleas, ducked under wild branches (but no matter, at my height I was always ducking), doubled and tripled back, going for every blade, taking the opportunity to examine the famous building, almost a mausoleum: leaded windows, iron shutters, massive lintel stones, an elegant but forbidding entryway, heavy oaken door looming at the top of a flight of ancient steps, the whole setup imported from Europe block by block, remnants of a feudal castle. Last pass, I killed the mower and studied the door, black iron straps and vast hinges, massive knocker held in a life-sized lion’s mouth, really enormous.
    Th ere was a bang and creak up there, and suddenly the door swung open with a momentum of its own. Framed by the blackness behind her, the ballerina appeared, hugging herself sleepily, dense