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memories are of our place at the lake. Not the lake as it is, a deep blue finger pointing through the north woods toward Canada, but the lake in my mind, which broke free of the good times—Michael and me sitting on the dock at night; taking the cliff walk hand in hand with Edie after the boy was in bed—to become the hazy emblem of what went wrong.
    Even the clacking of billiard balls, evoking slams, could take me there. Now the date was May 31, 1960, nearly twenty years after Edie and I met, and nearly one year before the start of this story. We had gone up to the lake for the Memorial Day weekend—me, Edie, Michael, and one of his chums from St. Dunstan's. It was Monday, and the boys had gone out in one of the boats. Michael was a crack sailor, another sport for which one does not need legs. Edie had intended to finish laying out her summer garden, but instead we fell to arguing over God knows what. And the next thing I knew she was hurling at me my having admitted the day before that I dreaded Michael's being an ocean away once we moved to Germany in the fall.
    Edie had had her own trouble in coming to terms with that, I knew, but now, with perverse unfairness, she accused me of needing our son too much; "an unnatural dependency," she said, speaking of perverse. I fired back that perhaps now that he was whole, she needed him too little, as if only his infirmity could interest her. It was an unforgivable retort, and I regretted it before the words had cleared my tongue, but it must have plucked the nerve of her self-loathing because it was then that she stormed out of the room and beyond, slamming doors along the way.
    Bang!
I thought of that sound in Rhine-Main Hall, then put the thought away.
    I usually let Edie go when she flipped out like that, but recognizing my own cruelty for once, I went after her—a mistake, because to get away from me, she left the house in her rage, which she had never done before.
    By the time I reached the threshold of the garage, Edie had already backed her car out and was swinging it around, kicking up pebbles and gunning away, leaving me staring at the road long after she had disappeared.
    I stood there until at last I realized she wasn't coming back. I didn't know yet what would happen, but I already knew for sure it would be my fault.
    In the Frankfurt version of that awful scene, Michael did not slam doors at me, but, while driving off, he refused to look back, to return my regretful wave.
    Where are you?

2
    A T ELEVEN O'CLOCK , from my study, I called the dormitory again, and when a student answered, I asked for the number of Mr. Jones, the residence hall director, a man I had never met but whose name was on the previous fall's welcome letter that I found in my desk. The student did not know the private number, nor if there was one. He said he'd find out, and once again the phone dropped into the oceanic limbo of sounds—harsh laughter, throbbing music, a shout. At last a rough voice grunted its hello, a brusque impatience that made me realize both that this was Mr. Jones and that he had just been woken from sleep.
    "I am the father of one of your students, Mr. Jones, and I am looking for him."
    "Who is that?"
    "Michael Montgomery."
    At once the stark silence of his nonreply registered in the knob at the base of my spine. I knew somehow to take his hesitation as the main revelation.
    "Michael Montgomery," I repeated, only now with the inflection of demand.
    "And you are?"
    "Paul Montgomery. His father. I am calling you from Frankfurt."
    "Michael is a five-day boarder, Mr. Montgomery. It
is
Mister, isn't it?"
    Most Wiesbaden fathers would have been addressed by rank, and I sensed Jones's relief to be up against another mere civilian.
    "I expected my son home tonight, and he did not come."
    "Well, as a five-day boarder, sir..." Jones hesitated, I realized, to summon his nerve. "...he wouldn't actually be our responsibility after 1700 hours of a Friday. Not