Eight days after they left there was a letter from Dot Fetters. Four pictures fell out when Sabine unfolded the paper. Three had been taken in her own backyard, but it was the fourth one that interested her. It was of a boy, thin chested and bright faced, maybe eight or nine years old, but Sabine was a bad judge of children. He wore a band around his forehead with a lone feather jutting up from the back, his eyes damp with pleasure. A sweet-faced, dark-haired boy who was her own boy. She would know him anywhere, in an instant. His jeans were faded and loose, his T-shirt striped. Sabine could barely make out the freckles that had left him long before they met. She studied his neck, his delicate shoulders. She memorized the gate behind him and the scalloped white border of the photograph. On the back, written in ink, were the most basic facts: "Guy, 1959." 1959. Sabine wished she had known him then, when she was a girl in Los Angeles. What had been wasted when she was only a well-loved daughter, her mother walking her to school in Fairfax every morning, lunch in a brown-paper sack, her father taking her to CBS, telling her she was sitting in Walter Cronkite's chair, even though Cronkite delivered the news from New York. What had happened to this little boy while she was sitting in Canter's after Hebrew school on Sunday, drinking cream soda and reading the funny papers while her parents divided up the Los Angeles Times? What had she lost that she could never account for? She reached over and pulled open the drawer on the bedside table where the picture of Kitty sat, faceup. Sabine lay on her back and held the two side by side. It was the same sun, the same scalloped edges; on the back there was the same handwriting, which said, "Kitty, 1959." Maybe the pictures were taken on the same day, or at least during the same summer. It was true, what Mrs. Fetters said: They were nearly twins; except, of course, for the wonderful feather. That was Parsifal's alone.
She looked at the pictures, one and then the other, for nearly an hour. She would buy a twin frame and put them with the family pictures on the table. She was just beginning to see the edges of a hunger she didn't know she had. When Parsifal died she lost the rest of his life, but now she had stumbled on eighteen years. Eighteen untouched years that she could have; early, forgotten volumes of her favorite work. A childhood that could be mined month by month. Parsifal would not get older, but what about younger?
So much time passed that she forgot completely that there was a letter. She didn't find it, half covered in the tumble of sheets, until she was ready to go to sleep.
Dear Sabine,
Many thank-you's for our very good time in Los Angeles. Bertie and I have not stopped telling stories about all our fun. I am sending you copies of the pictures we took. I look awful, but the one of you and Bertie is very nice, I think. Do you ever take a bad picture? I am also sending one of Guy, which I have always thought was sweet. I thought that you might like to have it.
I am still thinking that you should come to Alliance. There's no need to wait until Bertie's wedding. Come now and stay, we have plenty of room. I think that you are maybe sadder than you think and that being alone right now may not be the best thing. Maybe I'm not the person to be giving advice, but I feel like you are one of my own girls, and I know that this is what I would say to Kitty and Bertie and it would be right.
So now you know that you are welcome. In the meantime, thanks again for your time and generosity and for the pictures, which Kitty was so glad to see.
Love from Bertie and from me,
Dot
The handwriting was schoolgirlish, all the heights and curves evenly matched. It was the handwriting on Parsifal's postcard at the reformatory, it was the handwriting on the backs of the pictures. Had they had a minute of fun in Los Angeles? Sabine could not remember it.
"They only made things worse for you," Sabine's mother said at Canter's on Sunday. They were sitting near the counter. Sabine stared at the fruit in the display case, fruit salad in parfait glasses next to halved grapefruits. The cavities of the cantaloupes were clean and hollow, everything sealed in Saran wrap. The waitress came by and Sabine's mother mouthed the word "Horseradish" to her. She nodded in complicity and went on. "You're more depressed now than you were before."
"I'm not more depressed," Sabine said. "I am depressed, same as before."
"They had no business coming."
Sabine's father sat in silent agreement, stirring his black coffee to cool it down.
"I should have brought them over to meet you. I wish I had. You would have liked them. No one was more surprised than me, but I'm telling you, they are very decent people."
"Decent mothers don't send their sons to some children's prison for being homosexual." Before Parsifal's death, Sabine's mother had always dropped her voice on the word homosexual, but now that she saw it as the source of his persecution, she spoke it clearly; even, Sabine thought, loudly. "I will admit it, I think it is easier to have a child who is not a homosexual, but if I did I would have loved that child, not tortured him. What happened to poor Parsifal was sheer barbarism. A loving mother does not send her son off to be tortured."
Sabine sighed. It was not her intention to argue in favor of the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility. "It's awful, I know that. I just think it was a different time. I know that doesn't excuse it, but I don't think she understood what she was doing, what it meant."
"Nineteen sixty-six was not the Dark Ages. We were all alive in 1966. We are all held accountable for our actions."
They sat together in a family silence, listening to the sounds they understood, heavy china cups against white saucers, forks against plates, ice ringing against the sides of glasses, and everywhere, everywhere, voices. No one could make out a whole sentence; but words, every one a free agent, fell against the sound of the cutlery and made a kind of music. A hand swept over the table, depositing a silver cup of horseradish beside Sabine's mother's plate.
"I was thinking," Sabine said, her eyes cast down, "of maybe going to visit." She had not been thinking of it exactly, but the minute she said it, it was true.
Sabine's father put down his knife, which had been raised in the act of putting jam on his bread. "Nebraska?"
"There's a lot I want to know. Things about Parsifal. There's so much I don't know." Sabine was speaking quickly, quietly, and her parents leaned forward from the other side of the orange booth. "You think you know someone, one person better than anyone else, and then there's all this." She spread her hands as if to indicate that what she didn't know was the food on the table. "What if you found out that Daddy wasn't who you thought he was? What if he'd been married before, had children you knew nothing about. Wouldn't you be curious?"
Her father looked startled and then confused. When he opened his lips, her mother spoke. "I know everything about your father. You shouldn't even think such a thing."
"I want to know what happened," Sabine said.
"He didn't want you to know," her mother said.
"But I do now. I know part of it."
"You never should have seen them."
Sabine closed her eyes and leaned her head back. "I did see them, there's no use in going over that." Even in her frustration, Sabine felt sorry for what she was doing to her parents.