In the Still of the Night

some other soldiers and mildly gassed as well. The wounds, it was rumored, were burns to his face.
    He returned home and became a notable recluse. But he had a real war under his literary belt by then, with real experience to write about. His next book was very dark, very brutal, and was the account of a fictionalized officer, believed to be based on his own experiences, though he refused to be interviewed and never admitted which scenes were based on his own life and which were from comrades’.
    With the next book he returned to the Civil War, focusing on Robert E. Lee, who had been asked to serve as Commander of the Union Army and, with torn emotions, had turned it down to head the Confederates. But this book, like the Great War book, was darker and more violent than his earliest works. Two more books had followed and his output of work severely slowed. One was set in Roman times and the other was about the French Revolution. He remained remote from the public in his lifelong home in upper New York state.
    Lily had thought the chance of his coming out of hiding to get together with strangers was highly unlikely, and now, like Robert, she was wondering why her invitation had enticed him to do so.

    * * *

    Everything was as ready as it could be by three o’clock Thursday afternoon. Mimi was still tidying upstairs, but Lily didn’t want to be in work clothes when the guests arrived. They been asked to turn up around four. Plenty of time to unpack, relax and meet one another over drinks before dinner.
    Lily was at loose ends. Robert had given Agatha a good brushing outdoors and she was no longer shedding in clumps, only wisps. Lily and Agatha settled in the library, Lily because it had the best view of the Hudson flowing by beneath and beyond the long sloping yard, and Agatha simply because she stuck close to Lily as a matter of policy. Agatha, a mix of collie and something else, had been abandoned and starving when Lily found her in the woods the previous summer and adopted her.
    Without anything to do or anybody to nag, Lily let her mind drift. It drifted to her late father, who wasn’t someone she normally let herself think about. When he discovered that his great wealth had all vanished in the Crash through his own greed, he had committed suicide. Lily’s first reaction had been horror and sadness, but after the pitiful remains of his estate had been settled, she’d become angry.
    At first, Lily thought, How dare Father choose death over Robert and me? He’d wrecked the only kind of life they’d ever known, and hadn’t the spine to face up to it. He’d been a brilliant man and might have been able to recoup in time. And he’d have been a comfort to them and they to him. It wasn’t until the will was probated that Lily and Robert realized they’d actually have to get jobs—a totally foreign concept to them.
    For almost two years Robert, a devout New Yorker, had worked as a fill-in waiter in the elegant restaurants he used to patronize and occasionally squired rich old ladies—who always introduced him as their nephew—to Broadway shows. They were generous old ladies, but playing the role of gigolo to elderly women was a humiliation to him. Though nobody but Lily guessed that. Robert was an almost unrelentingly cheerful individual who disguised a very good brain behind a slangy playboy facade.
    Lily had taken work at a bank downtown in New York City where she spent dreadful long days mindlessly sorting checks and filing them. She had never made friends with her coworkers, downtrodden women with whom she had nothing in common. In almost two years of utter boredom and hard work, the brother and sister were only a few dollars ahead. They shared a wretched tenement apartment on the Lower East Side and a daily horror of winding up in the breadlines.
    When Lily saw a notice in the personals column of a New York newspaper urging Miss L. Brewster and Mr. R. Brewster to contact Mr. E. Prinney in Voorburg-on-Hudson, they suspected it was a joke someone was playing on them, but were so frantic at the heat of the city that they took the train to Voorburg and discovered that their great-uncle had left them a mansion and a fortune.
    Lily, who was about to be fired from her dreadful bank job anyway, was happy to move to the small town of Voorburg-on-Hudson where the view was spectacular, the surroundings were clean, and she could have a lovely bedroom to herself with her very own elegant little bathroom.
    Robert,