Listening to Billie
shocked, they now laughed softly at Catherine; they looked curiously at Eliza, never knowing what anyone in this family would say or do.
    Josephine was angrily thinking of her third wedding, to Jason Paulus. And at the same time she knew that her rancor was unfair. Jason was not actually a bad person. A Money Person,yes, in real estate, in Westchester—but not actually dishonest. He simply fell in love with Josephine and she forced herself to marry him—not knowing that marriage to Jason would simply exacerbate her pain at Franz’s loss. Ah, marriages! she thought, and scowled. But no one noticed.
    Eliza took her daughter’s hand, and they started toward the house, toward the festively decorated dining room, and the cutting of the cake.
    That night, after Daria and Smith and all the wedding guests were gone, Eliza and Josephine sat in the adjacent wicker chairs on the long front porch, watching the flickering lights from the faintly smaller moon as it was reflected in the lake’s small waves. The two women, unlikely mother and daughter, secret enemies, or so they seemed to themselves, conversed in a desultory, pleasant, if nearly exhausted way, as they listened to music from the machine inside the house.
    Not Billie; they were listening to someone named Horace Silver, whom Eliza had not heard before—a marvelous, dazzling pianist.
    “And a Portuguese Negro,” explained Josephine. “Satisfying two of my positive biases.”
    They laughed, and then Eliza said, “Well, yes, but do Portuguese really qualify as a minority?”
    “I don’t know about that, but some of them are terribly attractive. One almost broke my heart. A consul.”
    An unusual remark from Josephine, and for an instant they were simply two women, talking. Eliza wished her mother would go on in that vein. She would like to ask when? where? was he married? a Catholic? Well, of course he would have been. She would like to say: I, too, had a lot of trouble with a consul (The Consul). How did you handle it—what happened?
    But Josephine had her own ideas about mother-daughter conversations, as she did about most things. “In any case, isn’t Horace Silver marvelous?” she said.
    “Isn’t he, though,” agreed her daughter, who was thinking that what he is is incredibly sexy, which she did not say.
    The record stopped, and neither woman moved to change it.
    And into that silence Josephine made her second startling remark of the evening. She said, “Smith—there’s something so very odd about that boy. I don’t know—”
    “
Yes.
” They looked at each other, another rare moment of accord. But neither of these highly verbal women was able to say what she thought.
    “He’s very ambiguous,” said Josephine, and then laughed, aware that she had echoed what Smith himself said when she questioned him about a certain contemporary political figure, from California—a man who, to Josephine, was an unambiguous villain.
    From far across the lake a loon called, and Josephine said, “They always sound somehow female, don’t they?”
    “Yes.”
    On the other side of the lake, just visible now in the moonlight, were some small and oddly shaped islands, mostly rocks, with dark clumps of trees. Loons lived there, and other wild birds, and squirrels and chipmunks and rabbits. “Someone told me,” said Josephine, “that those islands are very like those along the coast of Yugoslavia, below Dubrovnik.” She laughed. “I must be getting ready for a trip.”
    They were quiet for a while, and then they both said that it was time for bed; they were tired.
    At the head of the stairs they lightly kissed good night, and separated.
    Seated at her desk, Eliza took up the fragments, the patterns of words that she had begun the night before. She crossed out one that was wrong, added a phrase. What was now on the paper was a mess, and so on a clean page she copied it out. She read over what was there, and her blood raced as sherecognized what she saw: a finished
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