Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

In fact, at that moment Frederick Barrow was standing at a podium in front of them reading in a singsong voice that made Miranda sleepy.

"He has kind eyes," she whispered to her mother.

Thinking really they were mischievous eyes, Betty whispered back, "A triumph for Annie."

Miranda wondered if she meant the turnout at the reading-which was enormous-or Annie's friendship with Barrow.

"A feather in her cap," she whispered, to cover her bases.

A serious, twiggy young man in a hand-knit muffler turned from the seat in front and glared at them, and Miranda was quiet. A wool scarf in the August heat spelled lunatic. Lunatics must not be disturbed.

Readings. If there was an upside to the recent implosion of her career, it was her release from the obligation of attending readings. Yet here she was, back in the saddle, daydreaming, pretending to listen, leaning her head to one side, then the other, to stretch her stiff, aching neck. But this reading was different. It was not for one of the Awful Authors. It was for Annie.

She watched Frederick turn a page. He was dressed in khaki pants and a stiffly ironed blue oxford shirt with a frayed collar. He wore faded blue boat sneakers. His voice rocked back and forth, a cradle of words, in the treetops, rocking, rocking. She tuned in for a minute to what the cradle contained. Something bleak. Something violent. A nightmarish creature, a Rosemary's baby of snarling prose, rocked softly in the writer's gentle voice. She let the meaning of the words drift past her, soothed by the sound of them, by the writer's sympathetic voice, by his kind eyes.

"Such bright, kind eyes," she said to Annie when the reading was over.

Annie smiled. She looked at Frederick, seated at a long table signing books. "He was wonderful."

She had been wary of meeting him at first. His work, highly regarded by many, was off-putting for Annie, embodying the qualities she disliked in both the Jewish writers of his generation (that showing off masked as neurosis) and the Wasps (the coldness masked as modesty). But Frederick had surprised her, for he was not at all like his novels. He seemed in fact that rarest and to Annie most welcome combination of qualities: both truly modest and truly neurotic.

"We look forward to seeing more of Frederick Barrow," Betty said.

"Maybe when his next book comes out," Annie said. "I'm trying to get Alice Munro for our next reading."

"Oh, Annie, don't be silly."

"I know. She probably won't come."

"Oh, Annie," Betty repeated, shaking her head. "You're impossible."

"Don't be coy," Miranda added. "I hate coyness in an adult woman."

"Do you like it in a young woman?" Annie said, as she was mercifully called away to speak to the volunteers who were folding chairs.

She glanced at Frederick and saw he was surrounded by young women and middle-aged men. An interesting demographic. Where did she fit in?

When the crowd had dispersed, Frederick stayed at the table, sitting on top of it now rather than behind it, talking to two young people, an ascetic-faced woman with incongruously large baby blue eyes, in her early thirties, Annie guessed, and a young man perhaps a year or two younger dressed in expensive casual clothes. Everything he wore looked soft, burnished, delectable: his light cotton sweater-or was it silk-his narrow pants. Annie wanted to touch them, every article of clothing. Even his buttery Ferragamo loafers. Like the lunatic in the audience, he was wearing a scarf, but it was of sheer white cotton lawn.

I do not fit in, that's where, Annie thought in answer to her own question.

Frederick saw her and waved her over.

"This is Gwen… and this is Evan," he said, smiling at the two young people. "My children."

Annie tried not to survey them with too obvious curiosity. But she had heard so much about this son and daughter. Gwen had some sort of consulting business she ran from home, Annie remembered. Her husband was a lawyer or a doctor or a banker, she couldn't remember which, only that he "made a living," as her grandmother used to say. They had two small children, twin girls, who took violin lessons with tiny violins and played soccer in tiny uniforms. Evan had just left one job in public relations for another-Frederick had received that news during one of his dinners with Annie. "As long as he's not on my payroll," he'd said when he got off the phone, and Annie, who revered her children and would never have spoken sarcastically about them to anyone but herself, had been a little shocked at his disloyalty, then had quickly chastised herself as a humorless Jewish mother. Frederick had mentioned that Evan's girlfriend, with whom he had just broken up, was a model, something Evan himself immediately inserted into the conversation now, as if both she and the breakup were one of his professional credentials. He looked rather like a model himself, a tall handsome young man, and Annie thought she caught him making a model face in the window's nighttime reflection, pursing his lips, glaring, pulling in his chin just a fraction.

"So you're the famous Annie," Gwen said with a distinct lack of warmth.

"Dad talks so much about you," Evan said, and Annie got the impression that, like his sister, he would have preferred that "Dad" find a new topic of conversation.

"Annie, I was hoping I could take you out to a celebratory dinner tonight," Frederick said.

"Don't you think you should be getting back, Dad?" Evan said. "I don't like the idea of you driving so far at night."

Frederick laughed. "You guys," he said.

"It's a six-hour drive," his daughter said sharply. "Six and a half."

"Isn't it lucky I don't have a curfew?"

Even as he said it, Annie could see that although Frederick may not have had a curfew, it would be enforced. She and Frederick were not going out to dinner that night. Children were tyrants.

Felicity had come to the reading to hear her brother, and as Felicity approached the table, her turquoise eyes wide as always, Annie noticed how much Gwen resembled her. Perhaps those eyes remained wide as she slept. Or rolled open like a doll's.

"You mustn't monopolize the star," she said to Annie.

"No, of course not."

"I mean, I am his sister." And she gave Annie a meaningful look, the meaning of which Annie could not make out.

Annie pointed to her own sister, as if that would somehow justify her standing by the table. "There's my sister," she said, and she waved Miranda over, signaling desperation by the childhood code of tapping her left eyebrow with her right pinky, a gesture distinctive enough for a trained sister to recognize but not quite awkward enough to arouse suspicion.

"Your father has a beautiful reading voice, don't you think?" Miranda said when she was introduced to Gwen and Evan. "I think this book is extremely powerful. The prose is so vigorous…"

The pro forma remarks, into which Miranda was politely inserting as much sincerity as she could muster, would have gone on, but Annie interrupted her with a blunt "My sister's an agent."

"Oh yes," Gwen said. "We know." She gave Miranda a cold smile.

"Infamy becomes me," Miranda said.

"Everything becomes you, beautiful Miranda," Frederick offered, rather gallantly, Annie thought. "'In thy face I see the map of honour, truth, and loyalty,'" he added in the exaggerated way people do when they are quoting.

"Lovely family, too," Felicity said, with her pie eyes looking almost challenging. "But then why shouldn't they be?"

"Where are you off to that's so many hours away?" Annie asked Frederick. She did not even bother to add "after dinner." Somehow that was settled-there would be no dinner. No discussion, no dinner, just settled.

"The Cape."

"Why you want to live there I do not understand," said Gwen. "The summer, yes. But winter?"