Father pays the bill and the two men walk slowly across the street.

"If it had been successful, Eliot, what would you have done when you returned home?"

"Done?" Father laughs and looks at the sky for a long time. "I don't know, Fuchs. Sometimes that possibility scared me more than being caught. Isn't that funny? Maybe in the back of my mind I have hoped all along that this would happen so that I would never have to worry about my future. Have you ever thought about what you'll do when Germany loses the war?"

How many bull sessions had I been in in my life where at three o'clock in the morning I was desperately trying to explain what life was about to a sleepy college roommate or lover? I got so caught up in all of the conflicting answers and possibilities that finally I'd end up either going to sleep or making love or being totally depressed because I realized that I didn't know anything at all.

The Galeners didn't have that problem. Theirs was the purest kind of Calvinism, except that they didn't have to worry about what happened to them on the other side of death. They couldn't change who they were or what would happen to them, but knowing that they would definitely get a B or a C on their final exam made all the difference in the world as far as their moment-to-moment living was concerned.

Saxony finally got the cast off, and although she limped around for a while because her leg was thin and weak, her spirits rose greatly.

The leaves had all parachuted from the trees and were slicked to the roads now. The days were short and either wet or gray or both. Galen went inside. The basketball team began playing on Friday nights and the gym was always packed. The movie theater, the stores – all the inside things were once again popular. You could smell the heavy winter dinners cooking in the houses, the damp wool of coats, the dusty closeness of gloves and socks and stocking caps left on a radiator to dry.

I thought of all the other little Galens everywhere else that were getting ready for winter. Chains for the car, oil for the heater, new sleds, bird food for the outdoor feeder, storm windows, rock salt for the driveway.

All of the little Galens were making the same preparations, only "out there," a man was getting into his car to go to the store. He didn't know that halfway there he would skid off the road and crash and die. His wife wouldn't think anything was wrong for hours. Then maybe one of his friends would discover the wreck, a gray plume of exhaust smoke still puttering out of the back end, melting the dirt-specked snow beneath it.

Or an old man in Maine would put on his L. L. Bean cardigan sweater and green corduroy pants and not know that in two hours he would have a heart attack while clipping the leash onto his pet dachshund's collar.

Mrs. Fletcher found out about my birthday and made me a huge, inedible carrot cake. I got a lot of presents too. Whenever I walked into people's houses they either had a cake or a present for me. I got a stuffed badger, ten hand-tied fishing flies, and a first edition of None Dare Call It Treason. When I came home from interviewing, Saxony stood at the door smiling and shaking her head long before I had even brought out my newest treasure to show and tell.

"You're a real hit here, aren't you?" She held the stereopticon from Barney and Thelma up to her eyes and looked at Dobbs Ferry, New York.

"Hey, look, that thing is worth a lot of money, Sax. Those people were really nice to have given it to me."

"Don't be so sensitive, Thomas. I was just saying that it must be very nice to be so wanted."

I didn't know whether she was being honest or facetious, but if I had had to answer her then, I would have agreed – it was nice. Sure, I knew why a lot of the Galeners did it – I wasn't that naпve – but I got to know what it was like to be respected and liked and held in awe: it was damned pleasant. It was a small taste of what both my father and Marshall France had known for most of their lives.

France had taken the cargo ship Arthur Bellingham from Liverpool to New York. On board he made friends with a Jewish couple and had a small romance with their nineteen-year-old daughter. He later dated the girl in New York, but nothing ever came of their relationship. He got the job with Lucente and rented a room in a transients' hotel a block away from the funeral home.

"Anna, how come you lied to me before when I asked you how long your father worked for Lucente?"

She was eating a bowl of Rice Krispies at the dining-room table, and I could hear the little snapping sounds inside her bowl.

"I don't want to get into a big discussion with you on it – it's just that I'd like to know why you lied."

She chewed up the mouthful she had taken and wiped her lips with a paper napkin.

"I wanted to see how good a writer you were before I really let you get going. That makes sense, doesn't it? That's why I gave you everything up until his immigration to the United States. That way, if you were good, then it would show in whatever first chapter you wrote. If you were bad, then I would just send you away and you would never have known anything. She plowed her spoon back into the cereal and went back to the magazine she had been reading.

"Anna? One more question: how come you never talk about your mother?"

"My mother was a lovely, quiet, Midwestern girl who made me join the Brownies when I was little and the Girl Scouts when I was big. She was a wonderful cook and she made my father's life very pleasant. I think he loved her and was happy with her because she was just the opposite of him – everything about her was down-to-earth. She admired people with great imaginations or artistic drive, but I think she was secretly pleased that she didn't have either. She once told me, secretly, that she thought Father's books were goofy. Isn't that a great word for them? Goofy?"

France's uncle, Otto Frank, was never very successful as a printer. He had moved to Galen from Hermann, Missouri, because he liked the location and because there was a printing shop for sale there cheap. He printed wedding invitations, business brochures, posters for church fairs and farm auctions. At one time he had had high hopes for starting a county newspaper (that's why he had written his brother in Austria and told him to send over one of the boys), but he had no money and found no one interested in staking him to his dream.

Martin arrived (having by then changed his name to Marshall France, much to Otto's dismay), and his uncle put him to work in the shop as an apprentice. Apparently France liked the work, and he stayed there until Otto died in 1945, the year A Pool of Stars was published.

The book didn't do very well when it came out, but the publisher liked it enough to offer France a thousand-dollar advance for his next work, which turned out to be the equally unsuccessful Peach Shadows. However, a critic named Charles White wrote a long back-of-the-magazine article about France in the Atlantic Monthly. He compared the author to both Lewis Carroll and Lord Dunsany, and it was one of the things that turned the corner for France's reputation. Anna had almost all of the letters he had ever gotten in Galen, as well as carbons of his replies to them; he had had no idea that White had written the article until months after it came out. He wrote the critic and thanked him. They corresponded for years, until White died.

Two years after Peach Shadows, The Green Dog's Sorrow appeared and almost immediately made the best-seller lists. White began a funny letter to France: "Dear Mr. France, sir: I never knew a famous author before. Are you one now? If so, can I borrow a hundred dollars? If not, thank God…" Suddenly the first two books were back in print, he was asked to do an anthology of favorite children's stories, Walt Disney had an idea for how to make Peach Shadows into a movie… Marshall France was a big shot.