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firmly, Theodor said, “ Guten Abend , mein Sohn .”
    That was it—after three years, but Julian supposed that Good evening , my son , was an improvement over being slapped across the face and called a lazy bum.
    Julian turned to his mother in her moss-green cotton frock and enfolded her in his arms. The only sounds in the parlor were Elana’s muffled sobs and Julian repeating, “Don’t cry, Mama,” and no one watching them would have suspected they were witnessing anything other than an adoring mother reunited with her loving son. Yet the truth was that Julian’s relationship with Elana had been more painful to him than the blowups with Theodor. Julian recalled his mother as a hovering angel who was always bleeding from invisible wounds that Julian believed were his responsibility to heal. After supper, while Theodor wrote in his study, Julian would keep her company, drying the dishes, listening to her wonder aloud what deformities of her soul had led her parents to abandon her to the lonely mists of an orphanage. Night after night, Julian waited for her desolation to recede. It never did: even her describing the joys of assisting the doctor who came to take care of the children echoed in his memory like a doleful nocturne. Now, as he let go of his mother, Julian recalled how desperate he’d been to boost her spirits, and how helplessness and guilt had crushed him when he failed.
    â€œThis is my friend Eddie,” Julian said.
    â€œI’m happy my son has a friend who would travel with him to Florida,” Elana said. Theodor grunted a hello and eyed Eddie like a beat cop about to roust a wino from the gutter, but he did introduce them to Garland Wakefield, who was kind enough to point out the side table across the parlor that doubled as a bar.
    Eddie was drinking an Irish straight up, and Julian a bourbon on the rocks, when a young woman entered from the front hallway with two men trailing her like courtiers.
    â€œJesus H. Rockefeller,” Eddie mumbled.
    In her milk-white dress, the woman was as radiant as a bride among mourners. Her thick, sable hair was brushed back well past her shoulders, and Julian assumed, incorrectly, that she’d studied dance. His assumption was based on her white ballet slippers and her posture, which appeared as rigid and supple as a sapling as she glided over to greet Theodor and Elana. Julian admired the white linen clinging to her curves as she came toward him with Garland and her two-man entourage, but it was her face that transfixed him: the luminous hazel eyes and high cheekbones, the bowed lips above a perfect chin, all of it adding up to a tawny, exotic beauty that he’d only thought possible in a fairy tale.
    Garland said, “These are the Larkin brothers, Derrick and Otis,” and as the four men shook hands, she added, “and this is my daughter, Kendall.”
    â€œNice to meet y’all,” she said.
    Julian could never adequately explain to anyone the effect of her voice on him. He’d expected Kendall to sound youthful and dainty, but her voice, despite its faint southern melody, was as cool and piquant as the ocean breeze coming through the parlor windows—a wise voice that somehow, with a perfunctory greeting, communicated to Julian that she was charmed by his interest. Julian was no expert at this game. His most enduring romance had lasted five months.
    â€œYou cats get lost on the way to the Cotton Club?” Otis asked as Julian watched Kendall go into the dining room with Derrick. Otis, the shorter Larkin brother, with glistening processed hair and an elfin face, was decked out for the boards at the Savoy Ballroom: a long, black sport coat with a purple-checked pattern that would give an acrobat vertigo; wide-legged, mushroom-colored pants pegged at the ankles; and gleaming two-tone shoes.
    â€œWhere you from, jitterbug?” Eddie said.
    Aiming what had to be the cockiest grin on either side of