“There’s various kinds,” said Milly. “Most are just obscene in an ordinary loudmouth way. A few have been personally threatening, but you can tell they don’t really mean it. I’ve also had a couple who said they were going to burn down the restaurant, and I reported those to the police.”

“Mother!”

“And so should you, Cecelia, if you do get that kind.”

“It isn’t Daniel’s fault if a bunch of lunatics have nothing better to do with their time than to… Oh, I don’t know.”

“I’m not blaming Daniel. I’m answering his question.”

“I was going to ask you, Daniel,” said his father, with a composure that came from not having paid attention to what had seemed, by the sound of it, just another squabble, “about the book you gave me. What’s it called?” He looked under his chair.

“The Chicken Consubstantial With the Egg,” said Daniel. “I think you left it in the other room.”

“That’s it. Kind of a strange title, isn’t it? What does it mean?”

“It’s a sort of popular modern-day account of the Holy Trinity. And about different heresies.”

“Oh.”

“When I was in prison you brought me a book by the same writer, Jack Van Dyke. This is his latest book, and it’s actually rather amusing. I got him to sign it for you.”

“Oh. Well, when I read it, I’ll write him a letter, if you think he’d like that.”

“I’m sure he would.”

“I thought perhaps it was something you wrote.”

“No. I’ve never written a book.”

“He sings,” Milly explained, with ill-controlled resentment. Abe’s vagaries brought out her mean streak. “ ‘La di da and la di dee, this is living, yessiree.’”

This time it was Cecelia who got up from the table in tears, knocking over, as she did so, the folding table on which the over-flow of the dinner had been placed, including the carcass of the half-cooked turkey.

Daniel regarded the idyl of the Hendricks’ front yard with a wistful, megalopolitan nostalgia. It all seemed so remote and unobtainable — the pull-toy on the sidewalk, the idle water-sprinkler, the modest flower-beds with their parallelograms of pansies, marigolds, petunias, and bachelor buttons.

Milly was perfectly within her rights being pissed off with him. Not just for not having got in touch for all those years, but because he’d violated her first principles, as they were written out in this front yard and up and down all the streets of Amesville: stability, continuity, family life, the orderly handing on of the torch from generation to generation.

In his own way, Grandison Whiting was probably after pretty much the same thing. Except in his version of it, it wasn’t just a family he wanted, but a dynasty. At the distance from which Daniel observed it, it looked like six of one, half a dozen of the other. He wondered if it wasn’t really the only way it could be done, and thought it probably was.

“Where do you go next?” Michael asked, as though reading his thoughts.

“Des Moines, tomorrow. Then Omaha, St. Louis, Dallas, and God only knows. Big cities, mostly. We’re starting out in Amesville for symbolic reasons. Obviously.”

“Well, I envy you, seeing all those places.”

“Then we’re even. I was just sitting here envying your front yard.”

Michael looked out at his front yard and couldn’t see much there besides the fact that the grass was getting brown from lack of rain. It always did in August. Also, the couch out here on the porch smelled of mildew, even in this dry weather. And his car was a heap. In every direction he looked there was something broken down or falling apart.

The year after he’d dropped out of St. Olaf’s College in Mason City, Michael Hendricks had played rhythm guitar in a country-western band. Now, at twenty-five, he’d had to relinquish that brief golden age for the sake of a steady job (he ran his father’s dairy in Amesville) and a family, but the sacrifice still smarted, and the old dreams still thrashed about in his imagination like fish in the bottom of a boat that have outlasted all reasonable expectations. Finding himself, all of a sudden, the brother-in-law of a nationwide celebrity had been unsettling, had set those fish into a proper commotion, but he’d promised his wife not to seem to be looking for a handout from Daniel in the form of a job with his road show. It was hard, though, to think of anything to say to Daniel that didn’t seem to lead in that direction.

At last he came up with, “How is your wife?”

Daniel flinched inwardly. Just that morning, on top of his standard argument with Irwin Tauber, he’d had a fight with him on the subject of Boa. Tauber insisted that until the tour was over they should stick to the story that Boa was still convalescing at the Betti Bailey Clinic. Daniel maintained that honesty, besides being simply the best policy, would also generate further publicity, but Tauber said that death is always bad P.R. And so, as far as the world knew, the romance of the century was still a going concern.

“Boa’s fine,” said Daniel.

“Still in the hospital though?”

“Mm.”

“It must be strange, her coming back after all that time.”

“I can tell you in confidence, Michael. I don’t feel that close to her any more. It’s a heart-throb of a love story in theory. In practice it’s something else.”

“Yeah. People can go thorugh a lot of changes in fifteen years. In less time than that.”

“And Boa isn’t ‘people’.”

“How do you mean?”

“When you’re out of your body that long, you stop being altogether human.”

“You fly though, don’t you?”

Daniel smiled. “Who’s to say I’m altogether human?”

Not Michael, evidently. He chewed on the idea that his brother-in-law was not, in some essential respect, his fellow man. There was something to it.

Far off down County Road B, in the direction of Amesville, you could see the limousine coming for Daniel.

There was a single backdrop for the show as it was being presented that night in the auditorium of the Amesville High School, an all-purpose Arcadian vista of green hills and blue sky framed by a spatter of foliage on one side and a sprightly, insubstantial colonnade on the other. It was utterly bland and unspecific, like a cheese that tastes only of cheese, not like any particular kind, and as such was very American, even (Daniel liked to think) patriotic.

He loved the set and he loved the moment when the curtains parted, or went up, and the lights of a theater discovered him there on his stool in Arcady, ready to sing yet another song. He loved the lights. The brighter they became, the brighter he wanted them to be. They seemed to concentrate in their tireless gaze the attention of the entire audience. They were his audience, and he played to them, and did not, therefore, have to consider the separate faces swimming beneath that sea of light. Most of all he loved his own voice, when it threaded into the delicate tumble of other voices that swelled and subsided in his own twenty-two piece orchestra, the Daniel Weinreb Symphonette. And he was willing, at last, that this should be his life, his only life. If it were small, that was a part of its charm.

So he sang his old favorites, and they looked at him, and listened, and understood, for the force of song is that it must be understood. His mother, with a fixed smile on her face, understood, and his father, sitting beside her and tapping his foot in time to Mrs. Schiff’s a la turca march-tune, understood quite as clearly. Rose, in the next row, hiding her tape recorder under her seat (she had taped the entire family reunion as well), understood, and Jerry, watching little bubbles of colored light behind his closed eyes, understood, although a major part of his understanding was that this sort of thing wasn’t for him. Far at the back of the auditorium Eugene Mueller’s twelve-year-old son, who had come here in defiance of his father’s strict orders, understood with a rapture of understanding, not in gleams and flashes, but as an architect might understand, in a vision of great arching spaces carved by the music from the raw black night; of stately, stated, mathematic intervals; of commodious, firm delight. Even Daniel’s old nemesis from Home Room 113, even the Iceberg understood, though it was a painful thing for her, like the sight of sunlit clouds beyond the iron grating of a high window. She sat there, stiff as a board in her fifth row seat, with her mind fixed on the words, especially on the words, which seemed at once so sinister and so unbearably sad, but it wasn’t the words she understood, it was the song.