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fund-raiser for Shirley Chisholm, and all the young members of Richard’s law firm were there.
    “Oh, Lord, no.” Mike smiled at the girl, for once not taking refuge in sarcasm. She knew that the nurse was a blind date, the daughter of one of her hapless date’s mother’s friends, and would not be asked again. Mike also knew that there would be general laughter after the couple had left, and several imitations. She felt sorry for her, and a small prick of kinship.
    “I lived in a big old white elephant of a house in the middle of town, and my father was—is—a lawyer. I think my grandparents grew some cotton once, but I never saw it. The closest I ever got to a plantation was seeing
Gone With the Wind
, just like you. I really did have an extraordinarily ordinary childhood. It might have been in Connecticut or New Jersey or Yonkers, for that matter.”
    “But was it happy?” the girl pursued. It was as if the smooth white mind behind the equally pristine brow could not conceive of normality or content in such an exotic region as Georgia. Mike might have told her that she had grown up quietly and happily on Uranus.
    “For God’s sake, Elise,” the nurse’s date muttered.
    “Yes, it was happy.” Mike smiled again at the doomed Elise. “It was just a plain, garden-variety happy childhood.”
    “And that’s true,” she said to Richard, who challenged her on the way home. “It was, except for thatlast business, and that wasn’t really part of my childhood. I can’t think how all the other years could have been any more normal.”
    It is astonishing how the immutable slain child in all of us colludes with its murderers.
    Claudia Searcy Winship, Mike’s mother, died at age twenty-eight of an undiagnosed congenital heart malformation when her second daughter was born. In addition to the tiny, squalling female infant, who was to have been a boy and borne the name of the paternal grandfather, John Micah Winship, Claudia left behind her in the large old Victorian house on Pomeroy Street a five-year-old daughter who was a petite, blue-eyed, ebony-curled replica of herself and a tall, slender, ashen-haired Lowland Scot husband who turned, on the night of her death, from a proud and exuberant young man with the world by the tail into a remote holograph of himself.
    For the remaining years that the new baby girl would live in the house that her father had bought his bride with his first year’s savings as an associate in an Atlanta law firm, a great, formal emptiness reigned. Almost the only sounds that could be heard in that temple once dedicated to the sweet, orderly litanies of Family were the treble pipings of exquisite small DeeDee (named Daisy for her paternal grandmother), the fitful uproars of troublesome baby Mike herself, and the sonorous grumbling of loving black Rusky Cromie, who minded the Winship girls, kept the echoing house, and anchored the world within it.
    In a large, dim study at the back of the first floor, outside the orbit of the house’s life, John Worthy Winship dwelled in silence with his damaged and souring heart, immersed in papers from his briefcase. He looked up only to rest his eyes on the photograph of Claudia in her wedding dress that stood on the desk. It was a rolltop of great, smoky age and looked to be afamily heirloom, but John had bought it from the estate of an impoverished farmer-scholar whose affairs the firm had handled; his own family had not been desk people. The only other ornament on its polished surface was a faded photo in a walnut frame of a plain white dogtrot farmhouse, leaning gently in on itself like a sturdy old woman settling into age, shaded by huge pecan trees. Behind the house were a few bleached outbuildings, and in the far distance fields stretched away into a streaked Kodak sky. Both the house and the photo had the look of age and weather and wear.
    John Winship had always called the house the homeplace, as was the custom in that part of the red north