28

As Mary Catherine trudged back across the field to where she had parked her car behind Morris's Suburban, a third car cruised up the road and pulled on to the shoulder behind hers. It was Mel's Mercedes.

Mel set the hand brake, climbed out, waved to her, and then ambled around on the shoulder for a minute or two, squinting off into the distance, taking in the vista. Views in this part of Illinois were not exciting, but they were vast, and a person like Mel, who spent much time pent up in a city, could come out here and stare at the horizon in the same way that a vacationer in New York or L.A. might go to the ocean and gaze off into emptiness.

Mel had given up cigarettes by the trick of switching to cigars, which were so noxious that, like nuclear weapons, they could not be used except in remote, desolate environments. He did not smoke them in his Mercedes for fear of imparting an eternal reek to the leather and the carpets. Now that he was out on the road, he fished the extinct butt of a fat stogie from the pocket of his trench coat and stoked it into life with a wooden safety match. Bubbles of silver smoke blew out from the corners of his mouth, elongated in the wind, and whipped off across the prairie, picking up almost palpable momentum as they headed for the Indiana border.

After a minute or so, Mel's gaze settled on the farmhouse, which he had helped to rebuild. The concept of a Jew learning to use a claw hammer had been considered revolutionary by both the Meyers and the Cozzanos, and had met with some resistance from both groups. But the young Mel enjoyed his trips out of town and had insisted on riding the train down at least once a week during the summers to pound nails. Three volumes of the library of Cozzano family photo albums were devoted to the reconstruction of the house, and Mel showed up in a number of pictures, pale, skinny, and bent as a peeled banana, kneeling on the bare plywood of the new roof among burly, copper-hued Cozzanos, nailing down the shingles one strip at a time.

Since then, Mel had always felt a proprietary interest in the Cozzano farmhouse. He had only a distant relationship with the Cozzanos who lived there now, but he liked to drive out from time to time and look at it, as he was doing now. Mary Catherine did not know whether he did this from pure nostalgia or from curiosity about the durability of his handiwork or both. She did know that photographs of the completed farmhouse had circulated widely among the Meyer family, as far away as Israel, as evidence of the wonders that a Meyer could achieve if he was not afraid to brave unknown fields of endeavour.

"When I was pounding in all those damn nails, whack whack whack, day after day, I had this terrible fear that I didn't really know what I was doing," Mel said, as Mary Catherine was vaulting the fence again. "I would have nightmares that all of the nails I had pounded in to that house would suddenly pop loose and all of Willy's nails would hold fast, and everyone would blame me for the house falling down."

"Well, it's still standing," Mary Catherine said.

"That it is," Mel said with satisfaction and finality, as if his sole purpose in driving down from Chicago had been to make sure that the house was still there.

"Have you seen Dad?"

"Yeah, Willy and I saw each other," Mel said. "So the social aspect of today's visit has been consummated."

"Oh. You don't want to socialize with me?"

Mel looked around them. A farm truck blasted down the road, kicking up dust and rocks with its windblast, inflating Mel's trench coat and Mary Catherine's hair for a moment. The red coal on the end of Mel's cigar flared bright orange and caught his eye. He stared into it as though mesmerized. "This is no place," he said, "to socialize with a lady."

She smiled. Mel was old enough, and good enough, to talk this way without seeming stilted or weird. "You didn't come down to socialize with me anyway."

Mel took one last draw on his cigar and then examined it regretfully. He pinched it carefully between the ball of his thumb and the nail of his arched forefinger, straightened his arm, aimed it into the ditch, and snapped the butt into a swampy patch. It died with a quick sizzling burst. Mel stood still for a moment, staring at it, and then expelled the last of the smoke from his mouth.

"Get in," he said. "Let's go get some coffee at the Dixie Truckers' Home."

She grinned. The Dixie Truckers' Home was right out on I-57. Mel had driven by it a million times but never been there; for him it was an object of morbid, sick fascination. Mary Catherine opened the passenger door and climbed in. Normally Mel would have gone all the way around the car and opened the door for her, but his mind was elsewhere today. As he had implied, this was business, not a social visit, and he wasn't thinking about the niceties.

The Mercedes was perfect for two, crowded for anyone else. It was ideal for Mel, who was unmarried and childless and presumed by many to be gay. He started up the engine and pulled out on to the road and gave the car a tremendous long burst of acceleration that took it all the way up past a hundred.

Mary Catherine's heart melted. Mel had always enjoyed thrilling her and James with the power of his fancy European cars, ever since they had been children. She knew that when he put the pedal down and squealed the tires on this country road, he was evoking a memory, for his own benefit as much as for Mary Catherine's.

"You know that the relationship between our families has been strong and will continue to be," Mel said, "even though, over time, it has gone through a lot of different shapes."

"What's going on?" she said.

Mel slowed the car down and looked sideways at Mary Catherine for a moment. He seemed a little surprised by her impatience.

"Just take it easy," he said, "this is hard for me."

"Okay," she said. Her vision got a little blurry and her nose started to run. She drew a deep silent breath and got the impulse under control.

"The reason our families have gotten along together is that the leaders - the patriarchs - have always been wise men who took the long view of things. And who were willing to do what made sense in the long run. Other people have looked at the strategies of the Cozzanos and the Meyers and scratched their heads, but we have always had reasons for what we did."

"What are we doing now?" Mary Catherine said.

"Willy doesn't know this, because I didn't want to stress him out," Mel said, "but the shit is finally hitting the fan on what happened in February."

"What shit? What fan?"

Mel cocked his head back and forth from side to side, weighing his thoughts. "Well, you know that we could have just hauled Willy down the front steps of the capitol and the whole thing would have been splashed all over the evening news. Instead we took a more old-fashioned approach. Like when FDR was in a wheelchair, but hardly anyone in America was aware of that fact because his media coverage was manipulated so well."

"We concealed the extent of his illness," Mary Catherine said.

"Right. We let his organization run the state government for a •while instead of just abdicating and turning things over to that putz, the Lieutenant Governor, as we were technically supposed to do." Mel spoke the last phrase in a screwed-up, Mickey Mouse tone of voice, as if the question of succession were a finicky bit of fine print, a mere debater's point. "Well, it might be possible to make the claim that what we did - what I did - was not, strictly speaking, ethical. Or in some cases, even legal. And sooner or later this was bound to come out."

"Let me ask you something," Mary Catherine said. "Did you know, at the time you were doing this, that it might come out?"