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details, and the details continued to accumulate until the congresswoman intervened to tell a story about her encounter, years back, with General Marshall, the general ill at ease in her presence even though she was the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Perhaps his discomfort was for that very reason. At any event, she let him off the hook. He so obviously preferred the company of men. His great probity and sincerity, his military courtesy, made him sympathetic. When he offered her a cigarette, she took it, and as he lit it she leaned forward, touched his hand to steady the match, and winked. A blush ensued. Everyone at the table laughed, and the doctor most of all. One story followed another and Harry’s war was discreetly put to one side. He did not blame them for their inattention, his awkward sentences summoning a house of cards built on quicksand, one fact after another and so many of them counterfeit. He felt he had let them down—his father was gazing at the Marsden Hartley and his mother had begun to collect the plates—but the war fit no known precedent or pattern in American history with the possible exception of the Revolutionary War. It was sui generis and unspeakably tedious unless you were engaged with it day by day. When you were there, the war was your entire life, as seductive as the sun now disappearing over the western hills, their outlines becoming indistinct. Coffee arrived and his father stepped to the sideboard to organize the cognac. Everyone except the doctor lit cigarettes, the smoke rising and hanging in the still air of the dining room. His father once said that Marsden Hartley reminded him of Vuillard, the one drawn to the outdoors and the other drawn to the in. Vuillard, the master of enclosed spaces, bedrooms, sitting rooms, dining rooms. Meticulous Vuillard, nothing beneath his notice, no piece of bric-a-brac or vase of flowers or the oval mirror on the wall. Sunday lunch in Connecticut ended in a drawn-out sigh, everyone rising slowly from the Regency table stifling yawns, tipsy.
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    The priest wound down at last, exhausted by his oration and perhaps by the demands of his faith, concluding with a toss of his head and a long fingernail pointing at the stained-glass window—it was known by the American community as the Connecticut Window—so the congregation could read for itself Cardinal Newman’s prophetic words:
The night is dark, and I am far from home.
Lead Thou me on!
    Harry was first out the door, emerging into the naked street, the familiar restaurant close at hand. Only a few of its sidewalk tables were occupied. He stood irresolute, wondering if a drink in the shade would help the afternoon along. The day was very warm and the heat came at him in a rush. He felt sweat gather on his forehead, the curse of the tropics; and then he remembered lunch. A colleague was giving lunch at his villa nearby, an open house in honor of an important guest from Washington, in-country for a look-around with a confidential report to the Secretary later, Eyes Only. It was necessary that the civilians get to him before the generals did, damned generals with their bogus coherence. Bogus charts, bogus bar graphs, with a young lieutenant fresh from Princeton to supply commentary. A military briefing was an art form that hovered somewhere between German Expressionism and the Innocenti of the Italian Renaissance. By contrast, the civilians drew cartoons. Tell our guest about your clinic, Harry. What gives? But Harry thought better of the open house and decided to go home, have a bite of lunch, read something. He could take a book to the silk-string hammock under the spreading ficus tree, a pitcher of iced tea at his side. Something on the phonograph. But then he felt a hand on his arm and turned to find Sieglinde, the technician from the hospital ship. He did not expect to see her. She had hinted she was going away, perhaps for good and perhaps not for good. But he