“It just looks so cozy. Is that the bartender from the club? He’s such a cutie pie. Oh, don’t give me that look, Jim! I think I’ll have a martini. Not too strong. I want to get through the main course without falling asleep. So ’fess up, Agnes, what have you done to this room?”

  “It’s just the rain, Cheryl.”

  “Poor Jennifer. Jennifer is from Seattle. It rains all the time in Seattle, doesn’t it, Jennifer?”

  “Pretty much.”

  The Sassons and their unhappy houseguests were joined by three more well-preserved, well-off, well-behaved retired couples in their late sixties, and they all ate dinner together at the Hopkinses’ beautiful home in Kapalua on the night before Stafford left for Canada. There were no incidents. Nobody drank too much or even too little, and the catered food was served in the right amount and at the right time. The women admired Agnes’s home. The men admired one another. No one was confused about what was funny and what was not. Everyone knew which fork to use and what to say when Buzz and Patti boasted about their grandson’s recent marriage to the daughter of a well-connected senator who had taken a tough stand on drugs. Everyone knew that if Jim and Cheryl wanted to talk about their drug-addicted son, they would bring it up. Everyone knew that Judy Dixon was too sharp with Murray and that the adult children from his second marriage detested her. Everyone knew that it was wrong for Jennifer to slather butter all over her bun in public. Everyone knew that Donna Buckley was unaccountably dull for a woman so beautiful. Everyone knew that Ronnie Buckley had enough money to buy them all out fifty times over, but he couldn’t putt worth a damn. And everyone knew that if Stafford Hopkins hadn’t made a few hundred million in the TV business, not one of his dinner guests would waste a minute of their time in his company.

  From the far end of the table, Agnes tended to her guests, commenting appropriately on Patti’s decision to soften her pin-straight bob with chunky highlights but withholding less charitable observations about Donna Buckley, sleek in Armani but lacking the hips to make it interesting; Cheryl, childish in a ruffled blouse and Tom Ford lilac silk evening skirt; Judy Dixon, hostile in a Prada Plexiglas belt; Jim’s sister, Linda, in plum satin from God knows where; or poor, pathetic Jennifer, in low-rise jeans and a floral lace shrug top, somehow pulling it together better than the rest of them.

  This is my life now, Agnes thought. These women. This place.

  Unlike Agnes, most of the women believed they had been blessed by an upscale God who must surely want them to live as well as possible or He wouldn’t have given them so much money to spend. It was the philosophy they lived by, and they took comfort in the belief that their gratitude made Him happy.

  “We are just so blessed, girls,” Cheryl would say in her solemn little voice, usually on the back nine where the views were particularly good.

  Everyone would pause and smile thoughtfully from beneath their visors and nod their heads. Yes, they were all blessed, they would say, blessed and grateful too, most sincerely grateful. Agnes would smile, but she was careful to keep her head down and her mouth shut. Let Cheryl and the others drone on about good fortune under an open sky. For all their protestations of gratitude, still managing to convey the certainty they’d done something to earn or deserve it. Just hit the ball, spend the money, and shut up about it, she wanted to say, if only to see Judy Dixon’s jaw drop into the Dolce & Gabbana choker she wore to hide the scars of her neck lift.

  The Hopkinses’ dinner party ended at ten o’clock when Ronnie Buckley realized he should not have had whipped cream on his lemon tart. They would have to go home now, he said to his wife quietly. They would have to go straight home. Donna put her decaf down and waited for the right moment to stand up and begin the process that would transfer her husband from the Hopkinses’ great room to his personal toilet.

  “What a perfect evening,” she said at the first available opportunity. “Where has the time gone?”

  There were no after-dinner drinkers to contend with and no one who wished to linger after the others had left to analyze the party and dismantle the evening. The bartender and the caterers had all gone home, and the house was peaceful and cool with the rain still falling steadily. It had been an absolutely marvelous evening, the women said, and they all kissed Agnes, one after another, as they collected their fine cashmere wraps and their beautiful evening bags. Stafford shook hands with the men and kissed their wives, and everyone said again how pleasant the evening had been, and finally everyone walked out and the party was over.

  Stafford waited until the cars had left the driveway and then he went outside and checked that the driveway gates were locked. He returned to the house and keyed in the alarm codes. Agnes, he thought, must have gone down the hallway to their bedroom, but when he went to find her to say good night, she wasn’t there. Nor was she in her dressing room or her bathroom. He went back through the main hallway and found her sitting at the long table in the dining room. She had pulled up the shades and opened the windows, but the candles had been blown out and the room was dark.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asked.

  “I’m just sitting.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It was a nice evening, Agnes.”

  “Do you think they had a good time?”

  “Of course they did.”

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you, Stafford. Did you have a good time?”

  “Why wouldn’t I have a good time?” he replied softly, as if he had already asked himself the same question.

  “Stafford, please.”

  “No,” he said finally, and she sighed, and it was a sad little sound, he thought, like a child forever hopeful.

  “I’m sorry, Agnes.”

  “I know.”

  At three o’clock in the morning, Stafford was woken by the smell of his wife’s hand lotion. She had kicked the sheets off in her sleep and moved across the bed to lie next to him with her arms wrapped tightly around him and the side of her face pressed into his shoulder. It had stopped raining.

  CHAPTER 11

  Perfection

  It is clear that happiness is among the things that are prized and perfect.

  —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

  BOBBY SHEPHERD WAS BORN on April 1, 1945, at the Kingston General Hospital, fifty-seven days after Stafford Hopkins got his head stuck in his own mother’s birth canal. Bobby was a big baby, a meat-and-potatoes baby, the nurses joked, a baby worth waiting for. Privately, though, they were appalled that the man and woman who produced this perfect baby boy were old enough to be his grandparents. It was obscene for people their age to be having a baby and there were few people in the community who felt otherwise, even the French Canadian families who farmed north of Belleville. Poor baby, everyone said, poor little mite. As for that Andrew Shepherd, the women whispered, maybe he should leave his wife alone at night. And a few of them would shudder at the thought of Andrew and Susan, too carnally possessed to notice how unattractive they both were.

  Susan Shepherd knew that people disapproved, and she knew she looked foolish, a homely woman with gray hair and a worn-out face, her body so heavy with the weight of her pregnancy at the end that she could only lie on her side, propped up with pillows. She knew the doctor was abrupt with her because he was embarrassed when he examined her, and she knew the other pregnant women in the waiting room, all of them so round and soft with their own babies, found her presence unsettling. She dreaded the looks they exchanged when she came in with Andrew, and it did not go unnoticed how quickly they rearranged their seating, scurrying to sit next to one another like a flock of little birds rattled by the arrival of an old hen. But Andrew Shepherd didn’t give a damn. He would make sure she had a place to sit and then he would kiss her.

  “I’ll be doing some errands, Cookie,” he would say. “You just sit right here after you’re done and I’ll be back to get you.”

  “Cookie,” the other women would laugh, when Susan was called into the doctor’s examining room to be eased out of her clothes and onto the narrow table by a disapproving nurse.

  “What does he call her?”

  “Cookie.”

  “He calls her Cookie?”

  “Cookie this, Cookie that. More like a layer cake, I’d say.”

  “No kidding,” someone would say, and they would all laugh.

  Their husbands, young farmers and local men, called them by name or simply waited until eye contact had been made and then nobody would have to mention any names at all. Occasionally, and in private moments, their husbands might call them honey or even baby, but these were terms not so much of affection as gratitude. But Cookie was a silly name, as silly as the sight of Susan and Andrew Shepherd waltzing into the doctor’s office like a couple of pregnant teenagers.

  Susan would have laughed to think of herself waltzing anywhere. She had never been slim or attractive, even in her twenties, but Andrew thought her beautiful then, and even more so now, pregnant at fifty, and if everyone from Napanee to Morven wanted to laugh at them behind their backs, then let them laugh, he said, let them laugh like they just learned how. At night, he would wrap his arms around his wife and sing to her until she fell asleep, the melodies lost in the toneless pitch of his voice. He would love her, he said, every day of his life and they would have a champion baby in the springtime and maybe they’d plant a few more trees along the fence. So Susan kept her head up for the whole long nine months, but by the time the end came, she was very tired and afraid that the gift had come too late for her and that she would not live to receive it. It was miracle enough, she thought, that she had found a man like Andrew Shepherd in the first place. How could she expect more?

  Andrew had arrived in Canada in 1906 from Scotland at the age of twenty with the money left to him by a doting uncle who wanted him to escape the family business. Exactly what that business was, however, remained a mystery, because Andrew Shepherd never talked about the past, suspiciously untroubled by it. He was a large, ugly man with bad teeth and too little hair to compensate. His body was long and his legs thick. Fair-skinned and pale in childhood, his face grew ruddy as he aged, and by the time he laid eyes on Susan Douglas, a sturdily built Protestant girl from Alberta, the only tolerable thing about Andrew Shepherd’s appearance was the clear, pale-green color of his eyes.

  Susan had come to Morven in the spring following the Great War, ostensibly to comfort a pregnant sister before traveling on to Toronto where she intended to study music and murder the man who abandoned her sister. Had she not met Andrew at the door of Morven First Presbyterian, Susan’s life would have been quite different given her state of mind at the time. But Andrew had come to church that day to collect payment for a cow he had sold to another farmer, and Susan, a singer of considerable talent, had agreed to join the tiny choir for morning service. As Andrew approached the church, he heard Susan’s rich, contralto voice, which drifted out and across the churchyard, and when she came out, he was waiting for her.

  Three months later, they were married. Susan was twenty-four years old, and people said she made a lovely bride, all things considered. She never made it to Toronto, never studied music, and never murdered the man who had abandoned her sister, because he managed to die quite handily on his own of influenza that summer. Susan’s sister gave birth to twins in the fall and was married to a charming widower from Ottawa the following Christmas.

  “Life,” Susan said throughout her own, “is filled with second chances.”

  Andrew and Susan were considered foolish by the local community, but they were neither foolish nor clever. They were merely uneducated people with a shared capacity for wonder, and in the rural Ontario society of their day, wonder was frowned upon. Grown-ups did not wonder. They knew what they needed to know and left wondering to very young children and unstable women. But Andrew and Susan fell into the nebulous category of being vaguely unworthy of their own happiness because they failed to recognize that what they had in abundance came only to the few. It was wonder that made their marriage such a happy one and wonder that saved them later, when Bobby died.

  The Shepherd farm lay east of the Hopkins farm, and in wintertime when the trees were bare, it was possible to see the lights of one house from the other. The families were not friends, but there was no ill will between them, merely the kind of distance necessitated by religion and family history. The Hopkinses, after all, came from generations of farmers in the area who generally produced large families who married within the community and settled nearby, while the Shepherds were newcomers with vague backgrounds and a tendency to enjoy social isolation. But the birth of the two boys, Bobby and Stafford, to their astonished and aging parents, together with the proximity of the two farms, led to a friendship. A friendship that began with Stafford’s first awareness that across the big field with the pile of rocks in the middle of it was another little boy, a boy about the right age and with the right look about him. A boy without a brother of his own to worry about.

  “Where’s your brother, Stafford?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Emmett!”

  “He’s not up here, Father.”

  “I need him in the feed shed.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “You boys be careful up there. Bobby, you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No shenanigans with the chute, boys.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Emmett! Emmett! Goddamnit! Where is that boy when I need him?”

  It seemed to Stafford that his father was always looking for Emmett, and the sound of his brother’s name rang through Stafford’s childhood like the toll of a bell. Had there been other brothers and sisters to fill the wide gap between the two brothers, Stafford would have been shielded from the part he played and the importance of Bobby Shepherd’s friendship. He would have sat with the noisy younger siblings at the far end of the table, where unwanted food could be passed from plate to dog and where the heavy anxiety of his parents’ worries could not reach him.

  Emmett, what happened to you? Where did you go in the darkness, alone and unprotected? Why, Emmett, why did it all come to nothing?

  In later years, when Stafford had distanced himself from southern Ontario and was living so well in California, he was able to convince himself that the decline of lesser men was neither tragic nor inconvenient. Lesser men were merely the necessary members of a comprehensive society with their own useful purpose, and it was the responsibility of free men to coexist peacefully with them and accept their limitations without complaint. There could not, however, be friendship between them, because while it was true that a lesser man could live within sight of the city, his natural place lay just outside it and the walls would never be left unguarded.

  “Perfect friendship,” Aristotle wrote, “is the friendship of men who are good and alike in virtue,” and had he left it at that, the matter might have been settled. But virtue did not imply chastity or sexual purity in the context of Aristotle’s definition, and therein lay the difficulty. Virtue spoke to a man’s character and the force of his inner will. It could be strengthened or tempered with the judicious exercising of it, but it could never spring forth from a lesser man, because virtue simply wasn’t there in sufficient quantity to spare. It was, however, possible for a free man, a man who was greater than other men, to become friends with a lesser man or even a woman, but such friendships could never be perfect, because the love between them was unequal. For though there is often love between a father and son, a husband and wife, a teacher and student, or a master and his slave, the larger share of love will always flow from the lesser to the greater man in accordance with the amount of virtue each possesses. But somehow the argument floundered here, because love would always complicate philosophy and if Aristotle was unable to fully disentangle the threads that separated perfect friendship from the pitfalls of love and social inequality, it was not for lack of his own virtue. Stafford’s virtue would save him, but it could not save his brother or Bobby Shepherd and it could not restore the brain stem of Stafford’s unnamed son, because virtue could not be shared with those who did not possess it. Virtue could not be given.

  CHAPTER 12

  Duplicity

  Most people take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way.

  —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

  Sunday, March 9, 2003

  Toronto

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE person left who knew what Stafford had done to provoke his own fate, and when Stafford’s plane set down in Toronto and he emerged from the gate, it seemed right that he was waiting for him.

  “Uncle Christy.”

  “I thought we’d ride back together, Stafford.”

  “How did you get my flight number?”

  “Well, I called Roger’s office.”

  “Who?”

  “The lawyer, Stafford. Roger Nuland.”

  “You talked to the Shepherds’ lawyer?”

  “No, we just said hello and I asked for your flight number and then we said goodbye.”

  “How are you?”

  “Not so good, Stafford, not so good. But it suits me.”

  “I’ve ordered a car. Why don’t you wait here, and I’ll come around to get you?”

  “Here, take my gloves.”

  “No—no. I don’t need them.”

  “Take them. It’s been cold for March and there’s more snow coming.”

  “What about you?”

  But his uncle just smiled and thrust his hands into the deep pockets of his jacket. Stafford hesitated. He no longer wore clothes not purchased exclusively for his own body, and he was reluctant to wear the gloves of the old man who stood before him, a man smiling down at him the way he always had, a great bear of a man with eyes now lost in the folds of his own skin. But knowing of no way out, Stafford put the gloves on and felt at once the warmth of his uncle’s hands like the grip of a handshake.