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Temple, the fiercest grief I had ever felt took possession of me. I had spent twelve full years avoiding that emotion, though, and I simply, by an act of will, warded it off.
    Neither of us spoke. She stepped aside for me. Finally when I was in the room and the door was shut and the moment had come when we might embrace, she said, "I am sorry for taking you from your monastery."
    I searched her face for an indication of sarcasm, but found none. I couldn't think what to say to her.
    She turned from me and walked efficiently to the window which opened onto a small balcony. She stood by a table with her back to me. In the distance, framing her dramatically, were the illuminated towers of the Jaffa Gate, and all too easily I imagined the red burst of an explosion, the chunks of stone over-ending through the air, the screams of wounded pilgrims. The enemy from Beirut had struck back at last. I could see that girl pressing her entrails back into the cavity of her stomach, only now I recognized her as my daughter.
    "Molly, why are you here?"
    "Mother sent me."
    "Why?"
    "She wants you to come home. She sent me to ask you."
    What could I possibly say?
    When I did not respond, she faced me. "Will you?"
    The show of longing with which she greeted me was gone, replaced by a studied indifference, no,
detachment,
which seemed unbearably cruel to me. And, of course, familiar.
    It was the perfect vengeance. I'd practiced it for years.
    I approached her carefully. "Molly, you know, we've jumped into the middle of a conversation we're not prepared for. We haven't even said hello."
    She averted her face. The water in her eyes glistened. "I wouldn't have come, but Mother asked me."
    When I put my hands on her shoulders she did not resist.
    In my
hands
I had held her, she was so small!
    "What's wrong, darling? Tell me what's wrong?"
    She nodded toward the adjacent table. A newspaper was open on it, the
International Herald-Tribune.
She touched it. "Did you see this today?"
    "No."
    I made no move to look at it. She picked it up and held the page for me to read.
    "China Discards Maoist Vision."
    My eyes fell several inches to a headline in the lower right-hand corner. The type was smaller, but I read it easily.
    "Michael Maguire, Ex-Priest, War-Protester, Is Dead."

TWO

    T O recover the secrets of one's past and lay them bare in the inchoate hope that even disordered testimony reveals the wider meaning of those events that left us numb—one attempts it feeling a certain desperation. I have found it impossible to resist finally, this strange impulse to sit at my desk—lean to your ear—and speak. It is writing, I know, but it seems like speech to me. An unexpected faith enables me to think I am not talking to myself, for I believe despite the evidence of the blank wall above me that you exist, that you lean toward me, that these solitudes—the writer's in his study, the reader's in his chair—are one solitude. If I am telling you two stories, Michael's and mine, and how despite everything they became this one, can't I also hope I am telling yours?
    Flaubert said the artist, the soldier and the priest face death every day. I say, bully for them! The rest of us face it once, maybe, and after that isn't everything just fucking awful? But also ... aren't we aware only then that we're alive? How often can one glimpse that open secret? And how often is the structure of its story revealed? Pity the sacred trio—artist, soldier, priest—if they do this every day. They could not possibly sustain the grief, the awe or the understanding, so death, shorn of its intensity, must become like flossing, like brewing coffee, like mail falling through the slot. Death; the artist paints it. The soldier wears it with his ribbons. And the priest douses it with holy water.
    But you and I watch death cross the land like a shadow once or twice in a lifetime, changing everything, and then we withdraw to our studies, our chairs, or to our