"What?"
"Well, I wouldn't know," her mother said. "But he was a loving boy, always hungry for family. One would imagine that these people, these Fetter people, wanted nothing to do with him. They probably sent him away for being a homosexual. There isn't likely to be as much tolerance in Alliance, Nebraska."
It had not occurred to Sabine. She sat back while the waitress brought her a bowl of mushroom barley soup and two knishes that looked very promising, flaky and golden in the soft light of the fake stained-glass ceiling. Sabine thanked her but was no longer interested in food.
"Of course he wanted to forget the past," Sabine's mother said. "He made things up, okay, he shouldn't have done that, but I imagine these people did not do right by him, otherwise he never would have denied them. If you ask me, it's remarkable that he left them all that money, money that should rightfully be yours."
"Stop that," Sabine said, and waved her hand. "There's more money than anyone could possibly spend."
Sabine's father inhaled slowly, sadly. They waited. "Another possibility," he said. He had spent his life in America just down the street, working as a tape editor for CBS news. He was used to changing things around to alter their outcome. "Someone could have hurt him."
"Hurt him how?" Sabine asked.
"It's possible," her father said reluctantly, "when he was a boy." He rubbed the back of his neck.
How Parsifal would howl at this, Sabine told herself. You and your parents sitting in Canter's talking about whether or not anybody put his hand in my pants when I was a kid. Sabine looked again at the pages she had memorized. Mrs. Albert and Albertine, but no Albert.
"A terrible thought," her mother said.
Sabine was ashamed of herself for not rushing to Parsifal's defense. Her parents had assumed that there was a perfectly good, if perfectly horrible, reason for his lie, but she had not. She believed their answer was somewhere in the neighborhood of correct, if not the exact facts, then the general tenor. Someone in Nebraska had wronged Parsifal enough to leave him unable to speak of what had happened.
"So do you think I should call them?" Sabine asked.
"That's what you pay the lawyer for," her mother said. "You don't need to waste your time talking to people like that. Parsifal clearly didn't want you to know them, so respect his wishes. Don't know them."
Sabine's father nodded in agreement and picked up a potato knish that was growing cold on his daughter's plate.
Sabine was grateful to her parents. Time after time she had asked them to understand things she didn't have much of a hold on herself. They had wanted her to be an architect, but instead she built miniature versions of suburban developments for architectural firms. They thought that with her beauty she would have married well, but she had devoted her life to a man who loved men. The years they had fought and wept and not spoken and made up were so far behind them now that the things that had been said were both forgiven and forgotten. Parsifal had come to their house for many Shabbat dinners and for every Passover and Thanksgiving. He had his own place at the table and there were always plenty of macaroons because he had once said how much he liked them. Parsifal had helped Sabine's mother wallpaper the kitchen. He had taught Sabine's father a particularly difficult card trick that mystified her father's friends. At the wedding her parents stood with them beneath the chupah and cried, if not from happiness exactly, then from love. They had disliked the circumstances, her mother would say, but they had always loved the man.
"We can't leave here until you eat something," her mother said to Sabine. "If you keep going like this you're going to vanish."
The waitresses skated by with coffeepots. They kept the old men happy. The manager brought Sabine a slice of chocolate cake she hadn't asked for and made it clear that she was welcome to stay in that booth for the rest of her life.
On the phone that evening, Roger said of course, no problem. He thought it was just as well that he contact the family. "But if they want to get in touch with you?"
"They're not going to want to talk to me," Sabine said. "No one likes to open up old wounds."
"But I need to know, if they ask me."
Sabine was drawing a picture of a small black top hat on the back of the phone book. After a moment's hesitation, she put Rabbit inside. "If they ask, then"-she bit the end of her pen-"then you tell them yes. They won't ask."
"If you're sure," Roger said.
Sabine said she was sure.
When Sabine was nineteen and had bothered to think about these things at all, she'd pictured Parsifal's mother as being extremely beautiful. That was when his mother was still the tragic heroine of the story. Her hair was thick and dark and she wore it pulled back carelessly in a barrette. She had long legs and tasteful gold jewelry and a good strong laugh. Her eyes tilted up at the corners like her son's. They were his eyes, pale blue like a husky dog's and rimmed in spiky black lashes. She kept one leg tucked beneath her on the front seat of the car as the family drove up to Dartmouth to see their son. They worked the crossword puzzle together aloud. A five-letter word for African horse.
Had Parsifal gone to Dartmouth?
The father was behind the wheel, getting the answers to all the difficult questions (five letters, Gulf of Riga tributary). Sabine was never told what he did for a living, and so she imagined him a scientist, spending his days in a white lab coat, checking on beakers and Bunsen burners. He was handsome, quiet, hopelessly in love with Parsifal's mother.
In the backseat was Helen, who tilted her head out the window because she liked to feel the full force of the wind coming down on her. She was still in high school, all legs and arms. She read magazines in the car. She answered all puzzle questions concerning movie stars.
Sabine made them out of bits of Parsifal's personality, characteristics of his face. She made their skin from the pale color of his skin. She put them together in her spare time, and when she had them all exactly right, she arranged them in the car and sent them speeding towards their death.
Dorothy, Albertine, and Kitty, quite alive in Nebraska, eluded her entirely. In fact, the entire state of Nebraska defied imagination. Who actually lived there? Every day that Parsifal lived in Los Angeles, he denied them, scraped them from the landscape again and again until they were hardly outlines. What had they done? Who had cut off whom? Parsifal at four, ten, fifteen-what could a boy have done that was so wrong? Sabine got the Rand McNally road atlas out of the trunk of her car and thumbed through to Nebraska, a page kept perfectly clean and uncreased from lack of use. Other pages showed green for hills, darker green for mountains, blue for rivers and the deep thumbprints of lakes, but Nebraska was white, a page as still as fallen snow. It was not crosshatched with roads, overrun with the hard lines of interstate systems. It was a state on which you could make lists, jot down phone numbers, draw pictures. And there, in the beating heart of nowhere, Sabine found Alliance. Alliance, Nebraska. How could he not have mentioned that? It didn't look like something you would simply forget.
Sabine took the adas back to Parsifal's study, a small room with a corner fireplace that looked out over the swimming pool. A favorite black-and-white picture of Phan holding Mouse on the flat of his palm was on the desk. Parsifal had conducted much of his rug business from home in the last two years. In drawer after drawer she found invoices, a sheaf of receipts, notes about particular Kashan and Kerman rugs he was looking for, names of buyers in Azerbaijan, a folded-up sheet of notepaper that said, in his own writing, "Poor wool was cheaper than good wool, and various processes of chemical washing temporarily concealed the deficiencies and imparted an enticing sheen to the carpet, which the unsophisticated thought charming." There were meticulous records of purchase dates and rates of exchange, employee 1040s that she thought she probably should send to someone. In other drawers she found notes on magic, mostly descriptions of other magicians, tricks he'd liked and wanted to figure out later: "From his mouth he expelled eleven yellow finches, one at a time, his arms straight out to either side." One note mentioned her: "His assistant balanced everything he needed on top of her head. Rather doubt I could talk Sabine into this." She put her face down in the notebook and smelled the pages.