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forums on “The Poet as Prose Artist,” and “The Fin de Siècle.” Fantasy Echo , she had misheard at the time, and assumed that was an important term of poetry: the fantasy echo. Like a chorus or refrain, but more mysterious and ghostly. The same chapel where he had mourned other dead scholars over the years—and yet not the same: those memories long layered there less convincing now the eulogizer was to be eulogized. Had it really been he who’d done such things, who’d been there all along?
    He’d been a wonderful speaker. Witty and canny, with the easy appearance (though a false one) of off-the-cuffness. He always prepared. “He could work a room,” her mother would put it. But that was unfair. He was the same with everyone he met, and this authenticity radiated, and pulled people in toward him. Flora felt herself so changeable, and found that quality in him miraculous. She even felt she looked different from day to day: Something about her face hadn’t yet gelled; her self hadn’t gelled. To be so constant, so reliably oneself, what would that feel like? Was yourself something you became? Had he been like that—himself—even at her age?
    Flora wound her way around the two oldest dorms, built in the early 1800s, North and South (“Here” and “There,” her mother had called them), humble redbrick twins, and down to College Hill, which offered the best views of the mountains and, in winter, the best sledding. A dip at the foot sent you flying above your sled and then, at the moment of reunion, thudding painfully back to earth. As a child, the pain had been part of the fun, falling under the category of pain/pleasure, like a loose tooth you trouble with your tongue, or like the time she and Georgia had given themselves paper cuts, tracing the lines on their palms and fingers till they were red and raw.
    Her father had been a mountains man when it came to views-Flora went more in for oceans. He’d loved this hilltop and walked here with Larks most mornings. The range ringing the valley that was Darwin was densely wooded with bands of late-fall orange amid swaths of evergreens. Flora was struck by its ruggedness, its wildness. Even cushy Darwin could seem remote. Going to the country was like going back in time, seeing how the world looked before it changed.
    A windbreakered father and daughter appeared beside her, he with a camera strapped around his neck, she with the eager expression of a college hopeful. He asked if Flora would take their picture before the view.
    “Are you a student here?” the father asked as they posed together, inches of green and orange visible between them.
    “I love it,” Flora said, lowering the camera.
    “A beautiful campus,” he said. “And quiet. Everyone busy studying, I guess.”
    “Or sleeping off their hangovers,” Flora said.
    The girl released a nervous, knowing laugh. The father reached for his camera.
    Down the hill, on the old clay tennis courts, two well-bundled men Flora identified as assistant professors were hitting stiffly back and forth in the chill, as if their primary goal were to move in the smallest radius possible. What day was it? She was losing track already—not hard to do in Darwin. On the other side of the courts was the small wooded area with the path running through called the Bird Sanctuary, where she had gone on gloomy walks with her father as a girl, and on the other side of the Bird Sanctuary stood the small house she had shared with her mother after they left the President’s House. A grim walking tour it was. The assistant professors waved—not necessarily out of recognition, but because waving was the done thing. She felt a sudden urge to perform for them—to do a cartwheel, or to lift her clothing and flash her breasts, to shock, to make a fool of herself. But she’d exhausted suddenness. She simply returned the wave and then turned and followed the road back toward her father’s house, a walk her father had taken countless