"Well, call," she said.
"I'd give anything to possess your trick," Jonah said suddenly.
"What trick?"
"Of closing your eyes to shut out the print, to shut out the noise of the world."
"I do it in defense," she said, watching his face.
"That's just it," he answered. "I have no defense."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing," he said, and smiled. "Good night, Sally. I'll call you soon."
"Good night, Jonah," she said, and went into the apartment.
He went down the steps rapidly, keeping his left hand off the banister because the wrist was throbbing and each time he tried to flex his fingers a sharp pain shot up the length of his arm, damn stupid little man. It was bitter cold in the street outside; he feared they would have sleet or hail rather than snow — nor gloom of night can stay these couriers from the swift completion, would they tear down the post office now that they had demolished Penn Station? There was nothing permanent in this city, it was a city determined to obliterate its past. If there is one thing all Americans share in common, he thought, it's this lack of an historical sense, a tendency to want to change the recent past as well as the nation's ancient heritage. Oh certainly, destroy the jail where they kept the accused in the Salem witchcraft trials, cover the shame of hysteria, but Penn Station? That noble structure razed to the ground to make way for a sports arena? Heinous crime, I sound like my father, he thought.
He walked quickly to the car, his ears tingling, and then fumbled with the key in the lock, it's foolish to lock a convertible, he thought, they only slit the canvas top. He closed the door behind him rapidly, started the car, and then sat in silence for several moments while the engine warmed and the heater began to operate. He took a pair of fur-lined gloves from his coat pocket, put them on, pulled the tails of his coat out from under him, twisted himself into a comfortable position, turned on the radio, and then eased the car away from the curb. There was an order to everything he did, he was certain he performed the same operations in sequence each time he entered his automobile. He was equally certain that his father, Zachary Willow, drove in an identical manner, and that his grandfather and his father before him had undoubtedly performed similarly in a horse and buggy on the cobbled streets of Danvers, Massachusetts. He had gone back there once to trace the heritage, a tribute to Zachary, who insisted that a man should know his roots, though Jonah had been born in Stamford, Connecticut, and could not have been less interested in a pilgrimage to the home of his forebears. But he had found there in the library records the history of a family, the cursive script difficult to read, embellished with curlicues and substituting f's for s's, words capitalized for no apparent reason, the ink brown and fading on yellowed brittle pages — Benjamin Willow married to Margaret, and before him Nathan married to Elizabeth Anne, and somewhere back in the almost illegible record, a Jonah Willow, apprentice seaman on a whaling ship out of New Bedford. He had made the drive back along the turnpike, the road markers showing peaked Pilgrim hats and witches on broomsticks, possessed if not with a sense of self, then at least with a better understanding of his father.
Zachary Willow was a lawyer, and his father and grandfather had been lawyers before him. There was in him a sense of order that was firmly rooted in a judicial system evolved from the English, and based in part on the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis, derived in turn from such early systems as the Code of Hammurabi and the Laws of Manu. In the law, there was stability and certainty, precedent and continuity. Zachary ran his Stamford house as though it were a courtroom, meting out justice to Jonah and his brother Lucas as though they were prisoners before the bar, firmly imbuing in them the knowledge that there was right and there was wrong and there was nothing in between. The law, to Zachary Willow, was inflexible and clearly defined: it described social behavior as surely as the Bible prescribed moral behavior. The law was the law, and you did not fiddle around with it, and you did not try for fancy interpretations because it had not been designed for that. It was simply and indestructibly created by men, to instruct them in, and to enforce for them, the rules of civilized behavior. "Where law ends there tyranny begins," read one of the inscriptions chiseled in marble on the Criminal Courts Building, and Zachary Willow might have chiseled it there himself.
That the behavior in the old Stamford house was sometimes less than civilized could not be blamed on Zachary. His eldest son, Lucas, must have been a trial to him from the very beginning, although Jonah only became aware of the conflict much later, when his brother entered high school and began playing football. Until that time, frightened of his father and simultaneously respecting him, almost venerating him, Jonah did not once suspect that his brother's opinion of the old man could be any different than his own. Surely there was serenity in the Shippan house, its green shutters facing Long Island Sound, the lawn sloping down to a seawall from which you could see sailing ships and pleasure boats, a view that never tired Jonah; there was, perhaps, still a trace of the original Jonah Willow in him, the man who'd sailed for whale out of New Bedford. "Call me Ishmael," he had once dreamily said to his brother while they sat side by side on white wooden lawn chairs on the green grass sloping to the Sound, and watched a double-masted sailboat cleaving the water. Lucas had replied, "Call me Shlemiel," but this, of course, was after he had joined the football team and was playing offensive back and feeling his oats. "I like physical contact," Lucas always said, "I like knocking guys around."
Jonah's mother was a slender woman with a flawless English complexion and magnificent brown eyes. Her family had come to Massachusetts in 1734, from a town in Wales — she always pronounced it quickly and melodically for him, slurring her l's and m's, but he could never pronounce it himself and had only seen it written out once. Watching her as she stepped surely and lightly over the sparkling grass to the seawall, he often visualized her ancestors walking in just such a manner, the hands delicately clasped, the head expectantly tilted as though listening for a hidden sound, before the splendid ruins of a castle overlooking the valley. She was softspoken and spoke rarely, but her silence could fall upon a room like a thunderclap in recrimination never voiced against one or another of his father's stern pronouncements. Her smile was sometimes like a knife; he had often "seen his father's bluster grow larger and therefore less meaningful as he rushed suicidally against that naked blade of a smile, her brown eyes solemn and unamused above it. His mother was not an affectionate woman, or at least not a demonstrative one. He could only remember her truly embracing him once, holding him close to her breast and frantically stroking his face, and that was the time Lucas pushed him off the seawall and he cut his hand on a sharp rock.
There was never any doubt that Jonah would one day become a lawyer like his father, nor ever any doubt that he would eventually marry Christine Dunseath. Looking back, he supposed now that the divorce was also inevitable. But he never had an inkling of that until it was fully upon him, and he certainly didn't anticipate it when he was courting her as a boy or when they were newly married and trying to make their way in New York. His courtship (the word was his father's and not his) was a natural development encouraged by proximity; the Dunseath family lived next door to them on Shippan Point. Albert Dunseath was Stamford's water commissioner, a ruddy-faced man with a hearty laugh, sparse blond hair covering his tanned pate, combed sideways to disguise the encroaching baldness. His wife was a dark-haired beauty from whom, fortunately, Christie had inherited her looks. She was an avid horsewoman, and was always stamping in and out of her house in jodhpurs and riding boots, flicking a riding crop against her legs, Lady Fitz-Ashton returning from an outing on the moors, Some tea, Lady Fitz? She scared hell out of Jonah with her imperious air and her startling beauty, the black hair cut in severe bangs across her forehead, the proud nose and generous mouth, blue eyes flashing, the riding crop flicking against her thigh, terrifying. Christie was hardly less terrifying as a child, a hellcat who gave Lucas a bloody nose once when he tried to take off her pants behind the tool shed near the big dying maple. Lucas was eleven at the time, and Jonah was ten, and Christie was perhaps eight, yes just eight. Lucas had got her pants halfway down over her knees when she suddenly decided she didn't like the game they were playing. She twisted away from him, her small white bottom flashing in the dappled shade, and hit him with her bunched fist. Jonah was terrified that she would tell her mother what had happened and cause her to descend upon their household like the mounted fury she most certainly was. But Christie was as frightened as he, and never said a word about it. She studiously avoided Lucas from that day on, though, and maintained a cool and barely polite attitude toward him to the end.