"No, ma'am," I said.

"It's quite permanent," she said. "I am utterly helpless to improve my condition without a man. It was the way I was brought up. It was the way I was educated."

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"Men in tuxedos as beautifully made as yours is should never call anyone but the Queen of England 'ma'am', " she said.

"I'll try to remember that," I said.

"You are only a child, of course," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"Tell me again how you are related to the McCones," she said.

I had never told anyone that I was related to the McCones. There was another lie I had told frequently, however — a lie, like everything else about me, devised by Mr. McCone. He said it would be perfectly acceptable, even fashionable, to admit that my father was penniless. But it would not do to have a household servant for a father.

The lie went like this, and I told it to Mrs. Sutton: "My father works for Mr. McCone as curator of his art collection. He also advises Mr. McCone on what to buy."

"A cultivated man," she said.

"He studied art in Europe," I said. "He is no businessman."

"A dreamer," she said.

"Yes," I said. "If it weren't for Mr. McCone, I could not afford to go to Harvard."

" 'Starbuck — ' " she mused. "I believe that's an old Nantucket name."

I was ready for that one, too. "Yes," I said, "but my great-grandfather left Nantucket for the Gold Rush and never returned. I must go to Nantucket sometime and look at the old records, to see where we fit in."

"A California family," she said.

"Nomads, really," I said. "California, yes — but Oregon, too, and Wyoming, and Canada, and Europe. But they were always bookish people — teachers and so on."

I was pure phlogiston, an imaginary element of long ago.

"Descended from whaling captains," she said.

"I imagine," I said. I was not at all uncomfortable with the lies.

"And from Vikings before that," she said.

I shrugged.

She had decided to like me a lot — and would continue to do so until the end. As Sarah would tell me, Mrs. Sutton often referred to me as her little Viking. She would not live long enough to see Sarah agree to marry me and then to jilt me. She died in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-seven or so — penniless in an apartment furnished with little more than a card table, two folding chairs, and her bed. She had sold off all her treasures in order to support herself and her old servants, who would have had no place to go and nothing to eat without her. She survived them all. The maid, who was Tillie, was the last of them to die. Two weeks after Tillie died, so did Mrs. Sutton depart from this world.

Back there in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, while I was waiting for Sarah to complete her toilette, Mrs. Sutton told me that Mr. McCone's father, the founder of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, built the biggest house where she spent her girlhood summers — in Bar Harbor, Maine. When it was finished, he gave a grand ball with four orchestras, and nobody came.

"It seemed very beautiful and noble to snub him like that," she said. "I remember how happy I was the next day. I can't help wondering now if we weren't just a little insane. I don't mean that we were insane to miss a wonderful party or to hurt the feelings of Daniel McCone. Daniel McCone was a perfectly ghastly man. What was insane was the way we all imagined that God was watching, and simply adoring us, guaranteeing us all seats at His right hand for having snubbed Daniel McCone."

I asked her what had become of the McCone mansion in Bar Harbor. My mentor had never mentioned it to me.

"Mr. and Mrs. McCone vanished from Bar Harbor the next day," she said, "with their two young sons, I believe."

"Yes," I said. One son became my mentor. The other son became chairman of the board and president of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron.

"A month later," she said, "around Labor Day, although there was no Labor Day then — when summer was about to end — a special train arrived. There were perhaps eight freight cars and three cars of workmen, who had come all the way from Cleveland. They must have been from Mr. McCone's factory. How pale they looked! They were almost all foreigners, I remember — Germans, Poles, Italians, Hungarians. Who could tell? There had never been such people in Bar Harbor before. They slept on the train. They ate on the train. They allowed themselves to be herded like docile cattle between the mansion and the train. They removed only the finest art treasures from the mansion — only paintings and statues and tapestries and rugs that belonged in museums." Mrs.. Sutton rolled her eyes. "Oh, Lord — what they didn't leave behind! And then the workmen took every pane of glass from the windows and doors and skylights. They stripped the slate from the roof. One workman was killed, I remember, by a falling slate. They bored holes in the naked roof. They loaded all the slate and glass on the train, too, so it would not be easy for anyone to make repairs. Then they went away again. No one had spoken to them, and they had not spoken to anyone.

"It was a very special departure, and nobody who saw it ever forgot it," said Mrs. Sutton. "Trains were great fun in those days, making such hullabaloos at the station with their whistles and bells. But that special train from Cleveland left as quietly as a ghost. I am sure the engineer was under orders from Daniel McCone himself not to blow the whistle or ring the bell."

Thus was the finest mansion in Bar Harbor and most of its furnishings, with sheets and blankets and quilts still on all the beds, according to Mrs. Sutton, with china and crystal still in the cupboards, with thousands of bottles of wine still in the cellar, left to die and die.

Mrs. Sutton closed her eyes, remembering the decay of the mansion year by year. "Served nobody right, Mr. Starbuck," she said.

Young Sarah now came out from between the furniture, ready at last. She wore two orchids, which I had sent to her. They, too, had been the brainstorm of Alexander Hamilton McCone.

"You are so beautiful!" I said, rising raptly from my folding chair. It was true, surely, for she was tall and slender and golden-haired — and blue-eyed. Her skin was like satin. Her teeth were like pearls. But she radiated about as much sexuality as her grandmother's card table.

This would continue to be the case for the next seven years. Sarah Wyatt believed that sex was a sort of pratfall that was easily avoided. To avoid it, she had only to remind a would-be lover of the ridiculousness of what he proposed to do to her. The first time I kissed her, which was in Wellesley the week before, I suddenly found myself being played like a tuba, so to speak. Sarah was convulsed by laughter, with her lips still pressed to mine. She tickled me. She pulled out my shirttails, leaving me in humiliating disarray. It was terrible. Nor was her laughter about sexuality girlish and nervous, something a man might be expected to modulate with tenderness and anatomical skill. It was the unbridled hee-hawing of somebody at a Marx Brothers film.

A phrase keeps asking to be used at this point: "nobody home."

It was in fact a phrase used by a Harvard classmate who also took Sarah out, but only twice, as I recall. I asked him what he thought of her, and he replied with some bitterness: "nobody home!" He was Kyle Denny, a football player from Philadelphia. Somebody told me recently that Kyle died in a fall in his bathtub on the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He cracked his head open on a faucet.

So I can fix the date of Kyle Denny's death with pinpoint accuracy: December the seventh, Nineteen-hundred and Forty-one.

"You do look nice, my dear," said Mrs. Sutton to Sarah. She was pitifully ancient — about five years younger than I am now. I thought she might cry about Sarah's beauty, and how that beauty was sure to fade in just a few years, and on and on. She was very wise.