The Summer Without Men

focus, and a special-order lap desk that holds the volume in position, she immerses herself in the lives of people she knows well, especially Anne Elliot, whom my mother, Bea, and I all love and chat about as if Kellynch Hall is down the hall, and good, old, long-suffering, sensible Anne might knock on the door at any moment.
    Pete and Lola are fighting, a lot.
    Daisy, who is still Muriel every evening at the playhouse, becomes Daisy Detective post-performance and trails her sphinx of a father around the city. The man has taken to long nocturnal perambulations, the meaning of which she does not understand. True to her character, Daisy dons flamboyant costumes for her gumshoe expeditions, which (although I know nothing of them or of her life as a spy at the time) seem likely to make her more conspicuous rather than less: Groucho Marx glasses, eyebrows, nose, and mustache; long blond wig with spangly red evening dress; tailored suit and briefcase; bowler hat and cane. Of course, in NYC, where the naked, the nuts, and the outlandish mingle freely with the staid and the conventional, she might have passed hordes of pedestrians without receiving a single glance. At around three in the morning, every morning, Boris returns to the apartment on East Seventieth Street, lets himself in, and vanishes from our daughter’s sight, upon which she returns to her apartment in Tribeca, throws herself exhausted onto her bed, and, as she put it to me later, crashes.
    Simon laughs for the first time. While Lola and Pete lean over the princely crib, their faces contorted with adoration, he looks up at his two devotees, waves all four limbs in a rush of excitement, and chortles.
    Abigail works her way through my six slim collections of poems, all faithfully published by the Fever Press in San Francisco, California: Lost Diction, Little Truths, Hyperbole in Heaven, The Obsidian Woman, Dang It, and Winks, Blinks, and Kinks .
    Regina forgets. Neither my mother nor Peg nor Abigail can say exactly when they first notice the decline in their friend’s memory. They all forget bits and pieces of recent reality, after all. They, too, occasionally repeat questions or stories, but Regina’s forgetting has a different coloring. The three Swans (four when George was alive) have tolerated Regina’s vanity, self-absorption, and restlessness (she could not eat at a restaurant without changing tables three times) because she knows how to have fun. She has arranged teas for them and called for tickets to this event and that one. She has told charmingly garbled jokes, and rarely appeared at the door of her friends’ apartments without an offering: a flower or decorative box or candleholder picked up somewhere on her life’s journey across continents; but the advent of potential thrombosis—“straight to my lungs and I’m dead”—has given her already flighty character an extra propeller that has started to whirl at high speed. Her growing amnesia for appointments, conversations, the location of her keys and purse, her glasses, and some faces (not Swan faces, but others) quickly turns into panic and tears. The deficits the other three joke about as “senioritis” or “old-lady brain” seem to devastate Regina. She has been rushing to her doctor three or four times a week, has sulkily repeated that she simply can’t believe, can&x2019t believe that she, she, Regina, who was once, by marriage anyway, a crucial player in the world of international diplomacy, has ended up in this place, a home—that’s what it is, isn’t it, a home? It strikes her as an outrage. And so, little by little, without anyone being able to pinpoint the moment of transformation, the old coquette has alienated herself from her far more stoical friends.
    Flora becomes psychological: “Mommy, you know what’s funny?”
    “No, Flora,” says Lola.
    “Sometimes I love you so, so, so much, but other times I really, really hate you!”
    Ellen Wright calls the other mothers, calmly recounts Alice’s story, and arranges a meeting of parents and children at her house. She asks me as well, but I beg off due to Bea and say I will reorient my class toward verses that promote the greater good—mutual understanding, warm camaraderie, melting kindness—although I have no clue how I will achieve this. I do know that the colloquy took place the Sunday after the fatal Friday when Alice poured forth the unsavory details of her persecution. The mothers and daughters (Alice’s