What I Loved

nights when we lay on blankets and studied the constellations that shone out as plain and clear as the points on an astronomical map. From our beds at night we heard black bears calling to each other in voices that sounded like owls. Deer came to gaze at the house from the wood's edge, and once a great blue heron landed a foot from the house and peered in at Matt, who was standing near the window. He didn't know what it was, and when he came to me to explain what he had seen, his face was still pale from the sudden apparition of a bird too large to be real.
    Bill and Violet and Erica and I worked while the boys attended a day camp in Weston until two in the afternoon, when one of the four parents would take the twenty-minute drive to fetch them. Erica, Violet, and I worked in the house. Bill set up a studio in an outbuilding on the property, a sagging structure he called Bowery Two. Those childless hours when each of us pursued his or her work remind me now of collective dreaming. I heard the soft sound of Erica's electric typewriter as she wrote the book that was eventually published under the title Henry James and the Ambiguities of Dialogue . From Violet's room I listened to the hushed drone of girls speaking on tape. Once, that first summer, I walked past her door on my way to get a glass of water, and I heard a childish voice say: "I like to see my bones. I like to see them and feel them. When there's too much fat between me and my bones, I feel farther away from myself. Do you understand?" From Bill's workplace I heard hammering, the occasional bangs and crashes, and the low and distant sound of music — Charlie Mingus, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, the Talking Heads, arias from Mozart and Verdi, Schubert's songs. Bill was making fairy-tale boxes. Each one contained a story, and because I usually knew the story he was working on, images of impossibly long hair, overgrown castles, and pricked fingers would sometimes float into my consciousness as I bent over a reproduction of a Duccio madonna. I love the flatness and mystery of medieval and early Renaissance art, and I labored over interpreting its didactic codes in terms of the sweep of history. The triptychs and panels of the Passion, of the Virgin's life, of the lives of the saints in all their bloody Christian strangeness sometimes overlapped with Bill's magical narratives or with Violet's starving girls, young women for whom denial and self-inflicted pain were virtues. And because Erica read to me from her book almost every afternoon, I found that the attenuated sentences of Henry James (with their numerous qualifying clauses, which inevitably cast doubt on the abstract noun or nominal phrase that had come before them) sometimes infected my prose, and I had to revise my paragraphs to rid them of a writer's influence that had drifted onto my page through Erica's voice.
    After camp, the boys played outside. They dug holes and filled them up again. They built forts from dead logs and old blankets and caught newts and beetles and several enormous June bugs. They grew. The two small children of the first summer had little in common with the long- legged boys of the last summer. Matt played and laughed and ran like all children, but I continued to feel an undertow in his personality that separated him from his peers, a passionate core that was taking him in his own direction. Because he and Mark had always known each other, because their relation was almost fraternal, a mutual tolerance of their differences lay at the bottom of the friendship. Mark was more easygoing than Matt. After the age of about seven, he'd become an unusually agreeable child. Whatever hardships he had endured, they seemed to have left no trace on his character. Matt, on the other hand, lived intensely. He rarely cried over cuts or bruises, but when he felt slighted or mistreated, the tears rushed out of him. His conscience was severe, even cruel, and Erica worried that we had accidentally created a child with a monstrous superego. Even before a reprimand was out of my mouth, Matt was apologizing. "I'm so sorry, Daddy. I'm so, so sorry!" He meted out his own punishment, and Erica and I generally ended up comforting rather than scolding him.
    Matt had learned to read slowly but steadily with the help of a tutor, and at night we continued to read to him. The books grew ever longer and more complicated, and they, along with several movies, strongly affected his imagination. He was orphaned and