Hazel would have wished not to be a witness to Gallagher’s humiliation. But she knew herself, by Thaddeus’s design, the crucial witness.

Beyond the flagstone terrace and the swimming pool with its rich aqua tiles was a stretch of gently sloping lawn. Not all of the lawn was mowed, there were patches of taller grasses, rushes and cattails. On a hill above a glittering pond, a stand of birch trees looking in the sun like vertical stripes of very white paint. Hazel remembered how in the drought of late summer, birches are the most brittle and vulnerable of trees. As in a waking dream she saw the trees broken, fallen. Once beauty is smashed it can’t ever be made whole.

Seeing where Hazel was looking, Thaddeus spoke with childlike vanity of having designed the landscaping himself. He’d worked with a famous architect, and he’d had to fire the architect, finally. In the end, you are left with your own “genius”-such as it is.

Adding, in a pettish tone, “Not that anyone much gives a damn, among the Gallaghers. My family: they’ve all but abandoned me. Nobody comes to visit me, hardly.”

“Really! I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Gallagher.”

Hazel doubted it was true. There were many Gallagher relatives and in-laws in the Albany area, and she had not heard that Thaddeus’s other adult children, a brother and a sister, were estranged from him as Gallagher was.

“You have no family, Hazel Jones?”

There was a subtle emphasis on you. Hazel felt the danger, Thaddeus would try to interrogate her now.

“I have my son. And I have…”

Hazel’s voice trailed off. She was stricken by a sudden shyness, reluctant to speak Chet Gallagher’s name in his father’s presence.

“But you and Chester are not married, eh?”

The question came blunt and guileless. Hazel felt her face heat with discomfort. Beside her, withdrawn and seemingly indifferent, Gallagher lifted his glass to his mouth and drank.

Hazel said, “No, Mr. Gallagher. We are not married.”

“Though you’ve been together for six years? Seven? Such free-thinking young people! It’s admirable, I suppose. ”Bohemian.“ Now in the 1970s, when ”anything goes.“” Thaddeus paused, shifting his bulk eagerly in the wheelchair. His groin appeared swollen as a goiter in the snug-fitting plaid trunks. His flushed scalp was damp beneath thin floating wisps of silvery hair. “Though my son is not so young, is he? Not any longer.”

Gallagher let this remark pass, as if unhearing. Hazel could think of no reply that was not fatuous even for Hazel Jones.

Thaddeus persisted, gaily: “It is admirable. Throwing off the shackles of the past. Only we, the elderly, wish to retain the past out of a terror of being thrust into the future where we will perish. One generation must make way for another, of course! I seem to have offended my own children, somehow.” He paused, preparing to say something witty. “There’s a distinction naturally between children and heirs. I no longer have ”children,“ I have exclusively ”heirs.“”

Thaddeus laughed. Gallagher made no response. Hazel smiled, as one might smile at a sick child.

The old man must have his melancholy jokes. They were this afternoon’s audience for his jokes. Gallagher had estimated, Thaddeus would leave an estate valued somewhere beyond $100 million. He had a right to expect to be courted, visited. The fat dimpled spider at the center of his quivering web. He wished now to persecute his youngest son whom he loved, who did not love him. He would poke, prod, stab at his son, he would demoralize his son, try to rouse him to fury. He hoped to make Gallagher squirm with guilt as with the most severe of gastric pains. Long he’d planned this passionate love-encounter, that was also revenge.

Winking at Hazel You and I understand each other, eh? My fool son hasn’t a clue.

The suggestion of complicity between them left Hazel shaken, uncertain. Her face was very warm. Here was an old man long assured of his appeal to women. He was suffused with a thrumming life that seemed to have drained from his son.

“Of course, none of us are. Is. Any longer. Young.”

Now Thaddeus began to complain more generally of the United States federal government, saboteurs in the Republican party and outright traitors among the Democrats, America’s cowardly failure to “pull out all stops” in Vietnam. And what of the “media manipulation” of leftist intellectuals in the country, that Senator Joe McCarthy had been onto but got sidetracked, and his enemies bludgeoned the poor bastard to death. Why, Thaddeus wondered, were Jews invariably the ones most opposed to the war in Vietnam? Why were most Jews, when you came down to it, Communists, or Commie-sympathizers! Even Jew-capitalists, in their hearts they’re Communists! Why the hell was this, when Stalin had loathed Jews, the Russian people loathed Jews, there had been more pogroms in Russia than in Germany, Poland, Hungary combined? “Yet in New York City and Los Angeles, that’s all you will find. In broadcast journalism, newspapers. The ”paper of record‘-the Jew York Times. Who was it founded the NAACP-not the “colored people,” you can bet, but the “chosen people.” And why? I ask you, Hazel Jones, why?“

Hazel heard these sputtered and increasingly incoherent words through a steadily mounting ringing in her ears. Mixed with the mad cries of cicadas.

He knows. Knows who I am.

But-how can he?

At last Gallagher roused himself from his stupor.

“Is that so, Thaddeus? All Jews? They don’t disagree with one another, about anything? Ever?”

“To their enemies, Jews present a unified front. The ”chosen people‘-“

“Enemies? Who are the enemies of Jews? Nazis? Anti-Semites? You?”

With a look of indignation Thaddeus drew back in his wheelchair. The subtlety of his argument was being misunderstood! His disinterested philosophical position was being crudely personalized!

“I meant to say, non-Jews. They call us goyim, son. Not enemies per se except as Jews perceive us. You know perfectly well what I mean, son, it’s a matter of historic fact.”

Thaddeus was speaking solemnly now. As if his earlier baiting had been a pose.

But Gallagher rose abruptly to his feet. Mumbling he had to go inside for a few minutes.

Gallagher stumbled away. Hazel worried he was having one of his gastric attacks, that sometimes led to spasms of vomiting. His face had gone sickly white. Gallagher had begun to experience these attacks when he’d first been heckled at anti-war rallies several years ago, in Buffalo. Sometimes he suffered milder attacks before one of Zack’s public performances.

Damn him: Hazel couldn’t help resenting it, being left behind with Gallagher’s father. This grotesque old man in his wheelchair glaring at her.

Saying, in Hazel Jones’s way that was both breathless and apologetic, and her widened eyes fixed upon the glaring eyes in a look of utter distress, “Chet doesn’t mean to be rude, Mr. Gallagher. This is an emotional-”

“Oh yes, is it, for ”Chet‘? And for me, too.“

“He hasn’t been in this house, he said, since-”

“I know exactly how long, Miss Jones. You needn’t inform me of facts regarding my own God-damned family.”

Hazel, shocked, knew herself rebuffed. As if Thaddeus had leaned over and spat on her yellow organdy dress.

God damn your soul to hell, you bastard.

Sick dying old bastard I will have your heart.

The gravedigger’s daughter, Hazel Jones was. There was never a time when Hazel Jones was not. Saying, in an embarrassed murmur to placate the enemy, “Mr. Gallagher, I’m sorry. Oh.”

The white-jacketed servant hovered at the edge of the terrace, perhaps overhearing. Thaddeus noisily finished his drink, a vile-looking scarlet concoction laced with vodka. He too might have been embarrassed, speaking so sharply to a guest. And to so clearly innocent and guileless a guest. His glassy eyes brooded upon the swimming pool, its lurid artificial aqua. In the ripply surface, filaments of cloud were reflected like strands of gut. Thaddeus panted, grunted, scratched viciously at his crotch. He then rubbed his hefty bosom up inside the T-shirt, with a sensuous abandon. Hazel lowered her eyes, the gesture was so intimate.