George West had salt on his skin no matter how often or how thoroughly he washed. He thought about how he’d always wanted Violet, even before she’d ever bothered to look at him, how he’d admired the way her mind worked.

  “I wouldn’t want to,” he said.

  Violet turned round to face him. The room was dark, but she could see him perfectly well.

  “Do you ever think about it?” She didn’t like to bring up the subject, and she knew George liked it even less. There’d been another man before him, Lion’s father. It had all been a wretched mistake, except for the outcome, which Violet had never regretted, not ever, not once.

  “Never,” George told her.

  “How could you not?” As for Violet, she thought about it every day, even after twenty years.

  George laughed. “I think about fish. I think about you.”

  “No you don’t.” Violet laughed. When she laughed she sounded like a girl again, but then she started crying. She tried to hide it, she turned away; all the same, George knew.

  “I’ll talk to him,” George said. “He’s my son.”

  It was a few days before George could manage to get Lion alone. Since George Jr. was now fishing with them, the boat was no good. The house was too crowded, the days were growing shorter, and so George asked Lion to go hunting with him.

  “Hunting?” Lion said. They’d never done so before. “What would we hunt?”

  “Muskrats,” George said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for two men who had never gone hunting before to suddenly go after creatures who did no one the least bit of harm and had no worth to anyone except each other.

  Lion thought it over. He got his coat and put on his heaviest boots. It would be muddy out by Halfway Pond, the best area for muskrats, if that was what a man was after. They left early, while everyone else was asleep; they took the horses and rode down the King’s Highway, then into the woods. There was a fellow who lived out here, old Sorrel McCluskey, in a cabin he’d built on town land, who’d pretty much hunted the place clean and wore a coat made out of the pelts of the muskrats he’d caught.

  “Bad weather for hunting,” Sorrel said when they stopped by his cabin to pay their respects. “Muskrats like fog. Foxes like rain. But a clear day’s good for nothing.”

  Well, they would see about that. They were fishermen, after all. They had patience and plenty of time. There probably weren’t more than two muskrats left in the area, but that was fine.

  “Your mother wants you to apply for that fellowship,” George West said after they had both gotten comfortable.

  They had a nice view of Halfway Pond, but it wasn’t any prettier than the pond on their own property. “The thing is, if I apply for it, I’ll get it.”

  “I think your mother knows that.”

  “She doesn’t know me the way you do, Dad,” Lion said to his father. “The way we feel about this place.”

  George had brought along a breakfast of two ham sandwiches wrapped in kitchen cloths, and the men set to eating. It was so odd that George felt closer to Lion than he did to any of his natural children. Was it because Lion had been the first, or because Violet had needed him so at that time? Or was it simply because of who Lion was and always would be: George West’s favorite son. While they had potato salad, George thought about telling him the truth—that George wasn’t his father, that his real father had been a better man, a smarter man, a professor, as a matter of fact—but if George West was anything, he was honest, honest to a fault. To say Lion wasn’t his son felt like a lie, so instead he said, “Well, she’d like for you to apply.”

  They didn’t catch anything that day, but Lion brought his application back to Town Hall later in the week, and the entire family was proud of him when Jack Crosby came to town to present him with his fellowship. The whole town planned to gather down at the green on that glorious day, more to see Jack Crosby’s automobile than anything else, but there all the same. Lion was to leave with Crosby—that was part of the hoopla—a ride all the way to Cambridge in this gleaming carriage, rather than the dusty old steamer that left out of Provincetown. All of Lion’s sisters dressed up for the occasion, and George West put on his suit, the one he wore to funerals; Lion’s brothers made a plaque, which they hung on Lion’s bedroom door: Here slept the first man in town to go to Harvard College.

  After George had sent the children on to the celebration, he got the horses harnessed to the cart and went to look for Violet. She was in the field of sweet peas that were all abloom, at their glorious peak. The goldfinch came here at this time of year, for the thistle. The crickets’ call was even and slow.

  George West leaned one foot up on the stump of an old oak tree. Something white moved across the sky, a cloud, a puff of milkweed, the snow-colored blackbird that lived up by the pond.

  “Do you think I made a mistake?” Violet said.

  She was not yet forty, but she was tired. She realized that this one August day divided the before from the after. All at once she knew that Lion wouldn’t be coming back. She was right about that, as she had been about everything else. Oh, he’d visit now and then during his four years in Cambridge, but then he’d go on to Oxford, and he’d be given a position in London, teaching higher mathematics at the university. He’d be so concentrated on his work, so very busy, that he wouldn’t even fall in love until he was forty-two, older than Violet was right now.

  One day he’d be walking through Hyde Park and he’d see a young woman, an American girl, Helen, visiting an aunt and uncle, and he’d feel as though he was pierced through the heart. Nothing in the world of mathematics had prepared Lion for love. Nothing about it added up. He would think about the sweet peas back home at the moment when he met Helen, how they changed color depending on the sky, pale and pearly at dusk, pink under the noon sun, purple and violet and finally gray as the day disappeared.

  Lion would send photographs of his wedding, of course, a small affair in a lovely chapel in Knightsbridge. He would send Christmas cards faithfully, birthday greetings to all his brothers and sisters, books he thought his father would appreciate, illustrated texts about fishing mostly, hunting occasionally, perhaps as a reminder of that day they went looking for muskrat.

  To his mother, Lion sent a photograph of himself and Helen and the new baby, Lion Jr., framed in silver. They were poised in front of his MG roadster, his favorite possession. It was nearly impossible to see the baby’s face, but Helen looked lovely and young, and there were glorious chestnut trees, and the roadster shone like a mirror. Lion had been a fan of motorcars ever since that day when Jack Crosby gave him a ride to Cambridge. It had taken the best part of the afternoon to get to the city, and the motor had twice broken down, but Lion had been won over completely. He especially liked the feel of the wind, the sense of flying, the way the trees floated by.

  “This is the beginning for you, kid,” Jack Crosby had told him. He’d had to shout so that Lion could hear him over the rattling noise of the motor. They were both wearing goggles to keep the bugs out of their eyes.

  Every time he drove his car, Lion thought about that day. The way his senses had been heightened, the way he’d understood, all at once, what his mother had wanted for him. He thought about it when Helen and he went on holiday, their first after becoming parents, when the baby was three months, old enough to be left behind with a sitter. They needed a bit of time together, they needed the feel of the wind, the flying, the trees floating by.

  “Not too fast,” Helen said, even though she knew he wouldn’t listen. Lion had a mind of his own. Always had. The chestnut trees were flowering, and there were roses blooming. The car was going so fast, the air felt like honey, warm and sunlit.

  At home, their baby was asleep in his cradle. He had a wonderful temperament, and that was lucky for everyone. His babysitter would have to stay on, as it would be at least four weeks after the accident before his grandmother could come over by ship to get him. By then the child was sleeping through the night. If that wasn’t luck, what was? He didn’t make a peep. Not a cry, not a wail. He was absolutely lovely. One of a kind. A nurse could have easily been hired to take him across the Atlantic; certainly he’d be no problem. Even the sitter who’d grown so attached to him had volunteered. But Violet wouldn’t hear of it. No one would make such a far journey with this child, except for her. Not as long as she had anything to say about it.

  THE CONJURER’S HANDBOOK

  LION WEST, JR., WAS A MAN IN LOVE. HE thought about how this had happened to him at the absolute worst time in his life, and he wondered if that’s the way things were in the world. A person thought he was headed north, only to have the ice melt away. He thought it was daylight, only to realize what he was seeing was the trajectory of stars in sky. Lion was already engaged to a perfectly nice girl from Boston when he was sent to New Jersey for his basic training; he was still engaged to her when he was shipped off to France, and then to Germany, there for the liberation. Lion was a mathematician, like his father before him, but he had also studied German at Harvard, and was fluent enough to be thought useful. He was steady and smart, and more than anything, he was loyal. And yet, as time passed, that perfectly nice girl he’d been engaged to drifted further away from him; she’d become Carol from Wellesley, her easy temperament and innocence more and more of a puzzle, considering the times they lived in. Her memory had been replaced by the intensity of the things Lion saw all around him each and every day: blood and sorrow, starvation and terror, all kept pushing her out of his mind until she was tiny and elusive, a firefly of desire. They’d seemed so perfect together and their future had seemed completely assured, and then, one day, he couldn’t remember her name.

  Lion was among the men who walked into a camp north of Munich on an April day. They had a guide along with them, a woman who could speak not only German and English, but French, Italian, Polish, and even Yiddish, and who could therefore say, Show us to the dying, the children, the lost, in all those many ways.

  “These poor people,” Lion said of the people in the camp. The idea of the sort of horror that could exist erased everything he’d known before. What had he been thinking all his life? What had he been dreaming of? Columns of figures that always made sense, that’s what he had always admired. He was attracted to order in a world where there was none, and now he felt empty. When the wind came up, it cut right through him in some strange way that made him feel as though he were only half a person.

  “I’m one of those people.” The interpreter was a plain woman, a few years older than Lion, with sharp cheekbones and a wide mouth. “I’m a Jew. Do you have something you’d like to say about that?”

  “But it’s different, of course. You’re our guide, not a prisoner.”

  The interpreter gazed at him; her eyes were gray, impossible to read.

  “What does your father do for work?” she asked.

  Surprised, Lion admitted what he usually kept private. Both of his parents had been killed in a car accident when he was only a baby.

  “So much the better.” The interpreter seemed pleased. “Now you have no one to lose. You should be thankful. Maybe you have a wife?”

  Lion said no. He laughed at the very idea of ever marrying Carol now. The interpreter was wearing a rag of a scarf around her head, rough wool with frayed edges. When she glared at Lion he could feel the intensity inside her. “You think love is funny?” The guide came closer, so close he could feel the heat coming off her body, and it shocked him, like a spark. “I can undo any lock without a key,” she told him. “If I had to, I could kill a man with a scarf.”

  Lion had always been the smartest and the best at whatever he’d attempted. He was the one everyone turned to for help, for advice, the favorite of all. He knew the answers to things, or at least he had up until now. Now he wasn’t sure who he was. Was he someone who could stand on ground darkened by blood and not turn and run? Was he someone who fell in love at first sight?

  He asked around and discovered that the guide’s name was Dorey Lederer. She was their interpreter again, later in the week, while they interviewed children, trying their best to figure out what to do with those who’d been wrenched from their families and had not a single soul to call their own. When, after the best part of the next week, most of the children had been processed, the weather suddenly grew warmer. It was a joke of nature, perhaps, beauty and warmth in this wretched place. Now that there was no wind, Dorey took off her scarf and Lion West saw her head had been shaved.

  “Did you have lice?” Lion asked.

  “Everyone here has lice. As a matter of fact, you yourself have lice by now. You can’t walk through the gate here and stay clean.”

  “I didn’t know you were a prisoner here.”

  “I got out. I lied to everyone and anyone, but you can only get away with a lie for so long. Then you have to switch to another lie if you want to keep living. One minute you’re a prisoner, then you’re a soldier’s whore, then you’re a guide. I could be anything at all next. I know quite a few tricks. Want to see?”

  She asked Lion for some money, which she vowed she would make disappear. Lion was already lovesick. What he felt for her hurt, it was brittle and hard and all-consuming. He could not believe that in a place so full of death he had found someone so alive. “Close your eyes,” Dorey said. When he opened them again, she was gone.

  But it wasn’t so easy to escape from Lion; he tracked Dorey down. He wanted something from her. He wanted her in bed, but he wanted more: every secret she knew, every trick, every lie, every sorrow. She didn’t say anything when he appeared at her door, and he couldn’t tell whether or not she was pleased. Clearly, she wasn’t surprised. She drew him into her room and let him watch as she took off all her clothes. She had two long scars; still, Lion thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful. “Look at this!” Dorey said. “I mean it! Really look. This is something I can’t make disappear. Just so you know. So you don’t accuse me of putting one over on you.”

  Lion pulled her onto his lap and he cried; despite everything he’d seen in the past few weeks, or perhaps because of it, he wanted her more than he had ever thought possible. He had never imagined people could treat each other in such barbarous and hideous ways. He had never imagined he could feel this way. He thought about Dorey as he was falling asleep and at the moment he woke up and during all of his daydreaming time in between.

  “Sensitive men are useless,” Dorey said one night. “I give you the chance to get away this one time.” She had her mouth to his ear and she was whispering; her every word made his head pound. “I slept with a man who was a murderer. What do you think of that? Disappear if you know what’s good for you. Do it right now.”

  But it was too late. Lion had already begun to understand that he wouldn’t be able to leave Germany without her; he asked her to marry him and come back to Boston. He would be starting a teaching position at Harvard. He was just an assistant in the mathematics department, and although it wasn’t much, it was all he had to offer. He wished he could get her a big house in the country, and a horse like the one she’d had as a child.

  “Give me your handkerchief,” Dorey said. “I’d rather have that than a horse.”

  Lion did so, and Dorey quickly tied the silk in a knot around his finger. Lion tried and he tried, but he couldn’t get it off, not until Dorey bent down and untied the handkerchief with her mouth.

  “Now you belong to me,” Dorey said, as if that hadn’t been true from the start. “I feel sorry for you, really, because you’ll never get away.”

  Lion was stationed for a while in Berlin, and when they went back to the States they moved into an apartment in Cambridge, near the reservoir, where they liked to walk in the mornings, early, before they had their coffee together. When Lion’s parents died, his grandmother had taken him in and raised him; she was the person who needed to approve of Dorey, the one whose opinion had always mattered most. Perhaps that was why it was so long before they went to visit her: Violet West was not one to keep her opinions to herself, especially when it came to her grandson.

  Violet lived out at the old farm on the Cape, without heat or electricity; she still used the outhouse, and in the summers she cooked in the old shed so that the kitchen would stay cool. Lion had bought her a refrigerator, but she refused to have the house wired; she preferred to haul ice from the pond with some old haybag of a gelding she called Bobby and stack the neat blocks of green ice in the storage bin of the summer kitchen. Violet West had raised seven children and her grandson Lion. She had no fear of hurricanes or of loneliness; she hadn’t once complained since she’d buried her husband of over fifty years when he passed on from a series of strokes. She was beloved in town, well known for making the best chocolate cake in the commonwealth; she was the head of the library foundation, and she knew every single plant that grew in the bog, from pitcher plants to wild orchids.

  “What if she doesn’t approve of me?” Dorey asked as they prepared for their trip to the Cape. They had already married, quickly, to make returning to the States easier. Dorey had been employed by the German department at the local high school. “Will you divorce me? Will you throw me out on the streets? Even that won’t work. I warned you you’d never get rid of me. Give me your key,” she demanded.

  Dorey held the key Lion gave her up to a match, then returned it. “Try it.”

  Lion grinned and went to the door. He slid the key in the lock, but it wouldn’t turn. Dorey came over with a glass of iced water. She let the key float in the glass for a moment, then took it out and blew on it; when she tried it in the door, it worked perfectly. So perfectly, Lion had to kiss her then and there, even though when he kissed her he felt as though he were swallowing sadness. He knew he’d never be free from whatever this was between them, not that he wanted to be, not that he ever would.

  Lion rented a car so that he and Dorey could drive out to visit Violet. It was late fall, November, and the weather was especially bad. They been busy setting up their apartment, starting their jobs, getting on with their lives, and it had taken them far too long to visit Lion’s grandmother. Lion had a feeling of dread as the day of their visit approached: try as he might, he could not imagine the two women he loved in the same room.