In Its Season

(Set somewhere in the English countryside in the summer of 2024.)

August is 45

An age of uncertainty, August reflected. Would he face the perils that dog midlife? It’s always a question. You’re never sure how it will be posed. He was in the country at his sister Pen’s husband Tim’s family’s house. Tim, originally his mother’s friend, he’s known since he was a child. Tim’s sister Catherine is the doyenne of this outpost. She took it over as the siblings grew up. It had been their parents’ retreat. Later, she married Stephen, local to these parts, and they raised their children here. Ancient and rambling, it benefited from Tim’s ability to fix almost anything and from August’s attention to it as a specialist in renovating older buildings. Banking, his father’s line of work, took a lot of time. Architecture too, of course, but after taking his degree, he apprenticed at a small, bespoke practice. That he spoke Russian passably, picking it up from expats his mother befriended, turned out to be useful as others from that country showed up as clients. His mother helpfully sorted the benign from the malign, a task she was rumored to carry out for M16, but this was never confirmed. So, he gained a clientele, eventually taking over the practice. Entertainers and others for whom the cachet of these old places, in town or country, is appealing also became his clients through that venerable process, word of mouth, helped by mentions in the weekend supplements arranged by his wife and business manager, Prudence.

Tim was a kind of second father who became an uncle when he married Pen, joining the two families. Of her various rumored lovers, Tim alone won Constance’s trust and lasting affection; August’s too, and Pen’s. A piece of luck, as Jack, himself almost family, sometimes remarked.

August was finally past 44 and ambling toward that luckier Chinese pairing, 88. He also had Chinese clients, their superstitious natures living side-by-side with their innate materiality, just as their often-exquisite aesthetic sense was mixed with occasional garishness. He sometimes had to arrange for a street number to be altered, not to mention the directives of their flown-in feng shui advisors. He’d kept his unlucky age to himself.

Catherine and Stephen’s house was a literary sort of place, despite Stephen’s country roots. Like any married couple of differing temperaments, they divided things up spatially, the outbuildings and grounds his domain and all within but the mudroom hers. A dormitory housed the children; a wing of rooms sharing a bath the non-family adults; while the family claimed its traditional places.

August could trace his evolution across the decades, now finally family, like Tim and Pen. He earned his keep by organizing whatever Stephen or Tim couldn’t handle on their own, like retiling a roof or shoring up an old foundation. He slowly brought the house into the 21st century, insulating walls and windows, rewiring, replacing, upgrading. But much was left untouched. Along with Stephen’s ancient tractor and Tim’s beloved Lancia, they enjoyed keeping things in running order. “They will bury him in that car,” Pen noted. Likely true.

Prudence is 42

They had two daughters. Prudence wondered about having a third. She knew so many couples who stopped at two, but she liked them toddling around, despite the disruption they caused to the household. The girls were six and four, so their sister — she assumed it would be a girl — would go through life seven years behind the oldest.

August left such matters to her. He was a good father by nature, having had to fight for attention as a child. His mother tried to compensate for her husband, busy making the fortune that kept them all solvent, but she was equally distracted. August was as close to her sister, Penelope, as he was to Tim. Between them, they filled in as parents. Yet his real parents were benign in their own way.

One aspect of this was Constance’s insight that being sent off to boarding school, particularly his father’s, would be a disaster for August. She kept him in London as a day student, offering her daughters the same choice. Some went away, some stayed, but leaving it to them avoided the neuroses a family’s impositions can stamp on its children.

The end result, thus far, was August at 45. This season brought them to the country, his sentimental journey. She didn’t resent it. Tim’s sisters thought she was a good match for August, and they loved her daughters. The girls loved them in turn and reveled in the country. August taught them to swim. He pointed out the hazards of country life, but always anecdotally, making himself Exhibit A of what not to do and why. “You’d never be so stupid,” he’d add, thanking Providence for sparing him yet again.

He was very good at what he did, but not much good at other things on which his practice depended. It was therefore lucky that Prudence could do them in her sleep.

Like a film company, they pulled people in as a project needed. Bespoke, and large enough to be sequential not overlapping, the work took the time it took. He was clear about this, because the age of these houses ruled exactitude out re: cost and schedule. Yet August knew such houses inside-out and had an encyclopedic mind for artisans and suppliers. They too were handed around, and August was intensely loyal and generous in his referrals provided they held up their end. Friendship was his golden rule, and he also made friends of his clients, armed with his mother’s advice and the confidence (and wherewithal) to say no. Pru left all this to him, but made it her business to understand the mechanics of the clients’ family offices, whatever it took to stay current and make sure everyone else was paid. She also arranged the photoshoots and coordinated the profiles of these great and good, anxious to show off what they’d wrought, and saw to it that August was mentioned.

Every wife needs a wife. His librarian, as he called her, hired out of Central St. Martin’s, combined a thoroughness with anything handed her and a demeanor that would melt a banker’s heart, Pru saw. The clients loved her, ringing up just to hear her voice. She was unfazed by their attentions, having pledged her heart to a schoolmate, a relationship for the record books. Emma and Gemma, Em and Gem to Tim and his sisters, also came down in season, staying in a nearby cottage Pru rented.

So, in short, a third daughter was possible. In the country, the girls mixing with their cousins, it always seemed like a good idea. “This will repeat,” Tim told her, noting that her second and first shared a birth month.

Lev, God help him, is 83

Brunel was his given name, a matrilinear connection to the great engineer resonating with his mother, but in his rugby days he was dubbed “The Leviathan,” or Lev for short, and it stuck. Even his mother eventually gave in. As soon as he could, he made his way to The City, where he acquired a reputation for sensing the flow of things. Much later, one financial journalist compared that flow to climate change and credited Lev’s ability to spot the broader shifts earlier than his peers. His fortune wasn’t in the tycoon league, but substantial. Married to Constance, whose only real luxury was dresses, he avoided the baggage his peers acquired. A house large enough for her and their children, yes, but as the well-educated daughter of moderns, she foreswore live-in help, did her own shopping, gave the household a loose but effective order, bred admirably good-looking offspring. Her passion was contemporary Russian poetry, so a lot of expat Russian poets, but never in their house. She put up with his work habits, relatively all-consuming except on holidays, which he took religiously. He spent lavishly on those occasions, being to his mind far cheaper than a second house with a pool in Italy or France. It provided variety and avoided an encumbrance, both fundamental to his thesis, arrived at early on, to stay open, preserve capital, and be as unsentimental as possible about any investment. A house for the family’s all that’s needed. Cars are functional. He used public transit whenever possible, or cabs. He joined no clubs, sought no honors, backed no parties. He left philanthropy to Constance, popular with the doyennes.

He loved what he did. He enjoyed the scrum that trading often was, but his rugby days were long over. As th years passed, his coups were noted. Not that he said anything. The ones who noticed were the forensic journalists who kept score in a longer sense, interested in who’s still there when one crisis or another culls the herd. They also noticed that whatever herd was drawing momentary attention, he wasn’t part of it. And he stood out physically, of course. It wasn’t accidental, “The Leviathan.” He looked the part, and there were still men in The City who could attest to their fear of him on the pitch. Like others with that background, he was gentle, hugely tolerant, innately polite and kind in any other setting. Despite his absences, his children loved and defended him because of this. Growing up, it was Constance’s absences they resented. August, the most devoted to her, sometimes went along, refusing to be left at home. The boy inherited the engineering prowess of Lev’s Brunel ancestor, channeled into the derelict old manors and Georgian terrace houses he restored, a smaller ambit than his great predecessor, but beautifully wrought.

Lev’s reputation as a seer led to invitations to speak that he consistently turned down, but he did accept a lunch with the FT, liking the journalist. He ate sparingly, tuning his consumption to his clothing and mental clarity, so he suggested they meet at the V&A café, which he liked. His host marveled at the bill later in the published story. Money could be made, Lev said, but it took a lot of concentration to do so, like walking in a storm. He liked to walk. Seasonally attuned, aware of the small changes to one neighborhood or another, he made his way.

Constance is 76

Jane Birkin’s death caught her off-guard. “On a million mood boards,” Jo Ellison wrote. Constance admired but never copied her look; Serge Gainsbourg resembled the pirate band she befriended in the late-Samizdat era, when Russian poets filtered into London. Birkin was quoted as saying she’d never have left her first husband had he not run off, which she also admired. Loyalty to Lev was absolute with her, yet it was a loyalty on her own terms. Birkin was loyal, but she did ultimately desert Gainsbourg. Constance knew that it would be a grievous error to bed these poets, and Lev was unwavering in his devotion, second only to his work in The City, which he would drop altogether when they went on holiday. It was then and only then that they bred, as she thought of it. He was a large man. A friend returning from Tokyo once recounted seeing a Sumo wrestler lunching with his tiny girlfriend and wondering how they did it. “Carefully,” she said, and this was true of her and Lev. It was the opposite with a series of lovers, of which Tim, now remarkably her brother-in-law, was the last and most memorable. Just when her desire for him seemed like it might overwhelm her, a holiday with Lev gave her Tatiana, her youngest. A break from Tim turned into an ending of sorts, but then a walk in the park brought him together with Pen, a lucky event for all of them. Tim and Pen were perfectly suited, and Tim slid into the role of brother-in-law without a hitch. Lev admired his wit and his ability to fix almost anything. He and their children loved Tim’s family for its beguiling idiosyncrasies.

Constance was Constance in her own mind. She had no specific calling, but her mind was capacious. Tim was attentive to it, both before and after their liaison. He knew how much she knew, as did those Russian poets. She was someone to reckon with, the man at M16 said to her once. They would call on occasion, “just to talk.” Her instinct was the reason, as August saw too. Give her a Russian and she knew immediately if he could be trusted or not. It was unclear to her why this was, but it was unfailing. Only the men, but their women were often a confirming sign.

Lev stayed clear of Russia and China. Revelations of Stalin’s and Mao’s crimes had an impact, so he was wary. Xi’s drift back, which he spotted very early, was one of his coups, but his Chinese investments were minimal. He took Constance’s word that her Russian poets were good. He liked “Bratsk Station” and Brodsky in translation.

Editors were always after her to do translations, but she was no poet. She did help translators out, and would tell an editor based on a passage or two if a translation was likely sound or dodgy. She spoke it and heard it, but rarely read it and almost never wrote it. It came naturally to her, she discovered, this odd language, so much so that she could play with it, parody it, amuse her poet friends. It was one thing she and Tim had in common, this ability to hold quantities of speech or text in mind, then riff on it. He was wildly funny, if “wildly” could even be applied to Tim, in the interludes of their lovemaking, and she learned from him that humor of this sort is a means of paying attention. (Lev could mimic anyone in finance, she reflected.)

Tem and Jack are 66 and 76

The breeding room, as they called it, was now where Tem wrote her novels and short stories. There was a daybed and it got occasional use, as Tem had Jack’s number. Retired from The City, he tended his several gardens. One was the kitchen garden he planted for Tem early on, a joint project. The other was his longstanding involvement with Stephen’s domain at the country house, for which he was a patron and over time as valued a participant as Tim, owing to his facility with plants of all sorts and his instinct for the kitchen and informal gardens, fields, and river banks that fanned out from house and extended its domesticity into nature. Woods and water were part of it, and Jack loved to swim and fish. He was in his element completely, Tem observed, a boy again, unfettered by city life, and those she and the others bred took to him as they looked to Tim to teach them mechanical skills or supply them if they lacked them utterly.

She sometimes contrasted the children’s lives with their own, set sidewise by life when their parents expired. Jack loved his father, who died unexpectedly when he was seven. His mother never remarried. She had money, along with what his father left them. Sent away to school, he summered in Bayswater, the only house he knew. When his father was alive, they summered with his family in the country, but that ended. He saw his cousins occasionally, but his mother was as set sidewise by his father’s death as he was. Without meaning to, his family triggered her grief, so they curtailed these encounters. Jack took the brunt of the separation. Marriage, children, children’s children, a place in the country, throngs of cousins — all of this gave him back what he’d lost and sorely missed.

Tem’s fiction was like Sylvia Townsend Warner’s, one reviewer put it, and she could see that, but then he added that Katherine Mansfield haunted the proceedings. She liked this, but the haunting came from elsewhere. Like Tim, her work was noticed and sold well. Both had followings and were sometimes paired, their fate since childhood, but it seemed unjustified by the work itself, which was entirely different, viewed from within. Tim had what he called an observation engine, absorbing copious swathes of daily life and then working them up as dialogues, mostly, and their incidentals, usually surfaced in the back and forth. Tem too had a holistic memory, but strongly visual. She didn’t go as far as Elizabeth Bowen with her scenes, but was less minimalistic than Tim, who would describe a woman as beautiful and get on with it, like a Cavafy poem. She felt the details mattered. (They did matter to Tim, she saw, but only if they mattered to the person speaking, as with Constance in his first book, commenting on a dress’s provenance, one of the things that gave her away, Pen told Tem, and yet Constance likely would have been annoyed if Tim had failed to note it. Those dresses really did matter to her.)

Tem took to the role of banker’s wife. Their Bayswater parties were sought after, not least owing to her cooking, and she was a stunner in her prime. Jack’s colleagues wondered how he managed to land her, never suspecting how it actually went. Wary of dating and a bit wounded, they needed a push, so Tim stepped in, knowing them both better than they knew themselves, and provided one.

Pen is 64 and Tim is 76

“I am emerita,” Pen said. “A long time coming,” said Tim. She’d been a classics professor forever, and winnowing down and weaning her doctoral students was the primary delay. Despite offers elsewhere, she chose a metropolitan university so they could continue to live in town. Often asked to teach, Tim invariably declined. He and Lev shared a devotion to their work that made the trappings of success distractions. If a book was honored, he’d appear, speak briefly and gratefully, congratulate the other winners, thank the judges, and then leave as soon as possible.

Pen also wrote. A breakthrough in papyri deciphering almost derailed her retirement, but then her university offered to make her a senior researcher, enabling her to focus on this trove without the distraction of teaching.

Life was less mechanical than ever, Tim felt. Either the works were digitally embalmed and encased or the materials were composites, arcanely fabricated. He’d seen a sideswiped Mini reduced to the rubble lying around what remained of it. His old Lancia was a relic of a different era. Pru’s Emma found someone in Italy to scrounge parts, but it took half a year to replace the oil pump. He could improvise, and did, but there were limits. Stephen’s tractor, an ancient Massey-Ferguson was the same. August asked Tim if the Lancia could be electrified. In theory, yes, he said, and he’d considered it, as internal combustion motors were like tobacco now to climate activists. He’d do it if he had to, but it would spoil the fun.

Pen’s three girls and a boy were fitted in around her academic career “in the manner of Elizabeth Anscombe.” Unlike the belle dame of Wittgenstein studies, Pen was funded lavishly by her father, a great lover of children, having missed his own to some extent in his quest to make money. He more or less took over Tim’s extended family as an outsized figure of largesse, so the country house was steadily improved, inside and out, and nearby places were acquired that seemed to contravene his dislike of excess property, but in fact he was okay with it if someone else held title and made real use of it. As he got older, his preference for it outweighed going abroad except to please Constance. He often went there alone.

Whenever Penelope imagined the ancient Greeks, Lev came to mind, like those farmers who took up arms for Athens, a diversion from plowing, then went back to it. He regarded almost everything as a sport of some kind, but when he fished, for example, he ate what he caught. He thought catch and release was cruel to the fish and stupid.

Pen was close to Tem’s Dem, August, and Tatiana, whose daughter Natalia, named for Tat’s favorite novelist and her Swiss husband’s mother, would soon marry at the nearby parish church, an event promising the kind of festival that made the season.

Reading Michael Frayn’s Among Friends, Tim told Pen it was at the border of too late, just shy of it. “Writing is a reflex,” he noted, “like playing scales. A book is new every time, unless it isn’t. If one of mine isn’t, please tell me.”

Tatiana is 38

Tatiana was a mystery to her siblings, but not to Lev. He felt she was like Constance had Constance’s appetites been directed in a different direction. Tat, as they all called her, wrote on media in the broadest sense. She started with art and film, then followed the trail. Popular culture interested her most of all, and she had a Lev-like knack for absorbing quantities of it and then drawing attention to aspects, typically widely disparate, that related. This is actually from Tim, Lev believed, but didn’t say.

She almost never discussed her work, pointing out that “it’s all there to read.” It was true: she wrote constantly, much of it notes for more substantial things in progress. “I work out loud,” she said. Tim in particular followed her assiduously. He wrote screenplays for fun (he said) and worked things in borrowed from her posts, a secondhand relationship to the media itself, to give his mind a sense of its form or nature. Her own tactic was similar, “snapshots of the flood from my ark,” rarely bothering to translate things, being mainly drawn to the action and the soundtrack. “Noise more than signal” was her view of the correct order to get an understanding. Lev totally agreed. “There are no signals, or hardly any,” he told her in Tim’s hearing. The three of them did discuss her work, as it was talking shop for them, given their minds.

A shorthand went along with it, part of their mutual sympathy. It was, she thought, likely a sign they were on the spectrum, but luckily they were still emotive. Minds like these are a kind of higher species, yet wrapped up in their bodies, hers and Tim’s one sort, Lev’s another.

Married at 18 to a Swiss architect, she lives mainly in Ticino. Lev foresaw Brexit, so Ludo opened an office in Milan. Prudence and August’s Emma is his back office.

Ludo and August shared the materiality and craft their work involved. Ludo loved Tim’s old car, sometimes borrowing it and singing 1950s Italian pop songs as he drove, to his daughters’ amusement. He and August were from different planets, aesthetically, but spoke the secret language of their profession.

It seemed odd to her that she wrote, given her subject matter, especially when AI threatened to take over, scaring the screenwriters into striking. Tim told her that writing is what humans do, will do. Machines will write like machines, just as some humans do already. If it can be phoned in, then it’s better that a machine does so than us.

Tat was all-in for the new, but she felt the past came along with it inevitably, just as Walter Benjamin asserted. Contemporary life may be the source of our creativity, but it’s an amalgam of the present’s weird flotsam and jetsam. We think often that we’re looking at an unchanging scene, but her father, for example, knew better, both at the micro-level of things observed on foot and the macro-level that drove finance in its oscillating, sometimes cataclysmic way. She and Lev had an oddly consonant view of many things. They rang each other up sometimes, just to compare notes, and once in a while money would appear in her account with an email to follow: “Your share of our conversation.”

Natalia is 20, Ben is 26

Ben, training in the genetic end of medicine, met Natalia at a party near Modena. She’d gone there to see Paola, whose parents owned the farm where the party was held. Paola’s mother Genia is a d’Este, the ducal family that ran the region back in the day. She and Paola were friends from a Swiss boarding school they attended. Paola introduced Ben as her American cousin. Now that they were engaged, she knew his convoluted backstory: lesbian parents, the father actually one of the women’s brother, Paola’s father, so she’s Ben’s half-sibling. Ben’s mother is the wife. Same with his sister Jo, now living in Ferrara, married to another d’Este. The father may be the son of Louis Kahn, the architect, but no one would confirm it. “Let’s both do DNA tests,” Natalia suggested. Ben resisted, but finally gave in. His showed that yes, Kahn figured, and confirmed that Trent, not some random donor, was his father; hers revealed that her mother’s father was her uncle Tim, not Lev.

And now Tim and Lev, so different yet equal in her affections, were here at the country house for their wedding. And Ben’s parents were here, too, along with his extended family. So, they put the DNA tests aside and wed across three successive days and nights. Ben made notes in an effort to sort out who was who. Jo and Giulietta’s babies won Natalia’s heart. Catherine, ever thoughtful, invited the newlyweds to stay on and use a cottage that appeared purpose-built for procreation. (Her mother vouched for it.)

One by one or two by two, the throng departed. Curious about the sort of medicine Ben intended to practice, Tem invited him for a walk, so Natalia went down to the river to find her grandfather fishing. She’d learned to fish from him, and he had a spare rod with him (always), so they fished together, giving each other luck. When Lev felt they’d caught enough for dinner, they sat back on the bank and caught up on the rest of life.

He was, as usual, open, loving, and innately curious about her. It led her finally to tell him about the DNA test. He said he’d guessed her mother was Tim’s, “unsurprising, as Constance was gone on him. I thought she’d drift off, but when she found she was pregnant, she thought it was me. It led her to cool things off, then August introduced Tim to Pen and the rest is history, as they say. Now you’ve confirmed what Constance herself never imagined. Once I met Tim’s sisters, I saw how your mother takes after them, but she favors Constance too, which masks it. Tim never knew, either, but he and Tatiana have an affinity. When he married Pen, he just slid into our family, a happy ending to a story that has your DNA test as a coda. It also solves the mystery of Trent’s father. He and his mother have wisely left that matter to the gods, and I suggest you leave this one with them, also. Not every revelation should be acted on. It can seem like a signal, but it’s likely noise.”

Paola, 24, talks shop

Leo made sure Ludo and August knew her granddaughter Paola was an architect. She’d finished at Berkeley in May. What appealed most to her was the woodshop — she craved tangibility. As she and Tim discussed his Lancia, he picked up on this, mentioning how the family’s two architects appeared to have things in common with Paola’s grandmother, despite the aesthetic differences of their work. “Apprentice with them,” he said, pointing to the season he spent in Bordeaux, years before.

So it was that Leo and Paola met with August and Ludo on one of the terraces Jack and Stephen had added to the grounds. A pergola shaded them as Leo made an introduction. Then Constance arrived and spirited Leo away. Inheriting her grandmother’s directness, Paola made her proposal straightaway. They listened, aware of her provenance. She’s very talented, Tim had said, a conclusion he’d arrived at as they bent over the Lancia. She could repair it, he told himself, “and enjoy the process.

“I tell Lev what to back,” Constance told Leo. “Lately, mothers and their babies have drawn my attention. I spoke with Bren and Lina about Modena. Bren told me you designed the clinic there which needs to be expanded. Lina said that the issues of Bren’s practice have led her to start a seminar in parallel. I gather that you and they are discussing these possibilities. My husband and I wondered if we could possibly help.”

Leo nodded. “There’s one other project to consider, the focus of Jo’s husband, Federico. He’s a d’Este like Genia, but another branch of the family that tends the farmsteads they reorganized as coops. Federico is the negociant who keeps it all running. He has an MBA and wants to see if the model can be replicated elsewhere. He and Stephen are talking, but he badly needs a mentor and I thought of Lev.”

“We spent a holiday once in that region,” Constance said. “I’d love to go back. Let’s talk with Lev. There’s so much here to work with, which will please him. We’re both so glad that Natalia’s marriage has brought our families together. It’s odd how that works, isn’t it?” Leo nodded. “It’s always how it works in my experience,” she said.

Leaving the men to work out the details, Paola went back to find Tim at work on his ancient car. “For a family sedan, it’s pretty high strung. We have a Pavoni at home, also venerable. When it works, it makes wonderful coffee, but the gaskets fail every two years and I have to rebuild it. The Appia’s engine is similar.” They leaned over it. “I tune it by ear,” he said. Like a woman, he thought, but didn’t say aloud. Paolo was aware how much Tim reminded her of Ben. Despite his excursion into genetics, he was as taken with tangibility as them. “Families are somehow like this beautiful car or your Pavoni,” she said. “They have to be lovingly tended.”

Jo is 24, Nora is one

Lev liked babies, so he gravitated to Jo and Giulietta, and sometimes took their babies so they had a little time to themselves. Jo’s Nora especially was captivated by this mountain of a man, who held her so solidly yet carefully. He had an instinct for adults too. He could ferret out their conflicting thoughts in conversation. Thus, he knew soon that Jo was of two minds about some things and not about others. Not, for example, about Federico, his ambitions, the wisdom of their marriage, the arrival of Nora. But her roles in life, especially those thrusted on her, were an issue. Leo was a Prospero-like figure, he thought, reluctant to break her staff. She meant well and much of her power was used for good, but she had blind spots, as all people do. In Jo’s case, what she missed was the nature of Jo’s ambitions. Leo was a creator, brilliant at it. Jo was a receptor, helpless without the germ of an idea, but exceptional once it was planted. And Leo had outrun her ambition, a situation Lev was now familiar with. You see what you always saw, but time is against you, so you look to others, but how do you tell them? What do you tell them? He depended on Constance’s help with this, but Leo had no Constance.

“Tem is who you should consult,” he told Jo. “She could be a model for you. She moves through life a day, a week, a month, a year at a time. Her plans are both specific and intuited, but she’s moved mountains in her time.”

Intrigued, Jo tracked Tem down and told her what Lev had said. “I’m honored,” Tem began. “I make no claims at all, but on paper, yes, I’ve moved some mountains, starting with Jack, not the easiest man to attract let alone marry, yet I did, and remade the household, rebuilt the family that life took away from us.” Then suddenly she began to cry.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I try not to think about it, but it’s always there and sometimes it surfaces.” She paused a moment. “I should explain,” she said. “My mother died having me, and then my father drowned himself in the river here when I was four. He never got over her, you see, and I blamed myself for it forever, but Tim rescued me, God bless him, so I’m left missing my father, who I loved. It wasn’t enough, our love, to save him, that was our family’s quandary. It left me a little unhinged. Tim says that we’re really just bystanders when it comes to the inner lives of others. When they weigh their lives and decide to take them, we can never know the math.” She put a hand on Nora’s head. “And Jack lost his father early, so we have that bond.” She shook her head to clear it. “Ever since, I lived a day at a time, but dared to look out a week, maybe a month or nine months. Life hands you such increments of time and they feel real or legitimate, time you can work with. My desires were quite simple, really: a house with children, a garden, a place in the country, a river where my father always is, mostly for better. When I’m here, I pray daily for his soul and he appears in my dreams. He can be calm with me and it gives us both pleasure, I feel. It never happens in London, so he must be tied to this place.”

Catherine is 78

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” Catherine said. “By proxy. I’ve just been with Tem,” Jo said, sitting down at the kitchen table. A cup of tea, warm bread, butter, and jam appeared. “She dreams of our father, but I catch glimpses of him,” Catherine told her. “It’s why I live here, why I married Stephen, my material man, to whom no ghost will ever show its face, yet of course he proved to be a medium and Tom passes messages through him to all of us. We’re why he’s here, I think, and our presence calms him.”

Their mother, Mary, bled to death after Tem was delivered, Catherine explained. Tom raised the alarm, but the doctor had gone out for a smoke and the nurses ran for him instead of helping her. He came at once, but it was too late. Negligence, the court ruled, and they got a settlement, which was useful as Tom never wrote another book. Mary had grounded him so he could write and not disappear into the world his writing accessed. He never found his footing, and despite his great love for them, his life was untenable. When he felt Elizabeth could keep the family together, he took this dreadful step, but it was an error, he likely realized, and his love for them kept him tethered to this place where they gathered.

In London, he appeared once in her room. It was “the most terrifying thing,” but the only way to tell her she should be with him, as his afterlife was hell. It was before she met and married Stephen, who helped her sort it out. He’s receptive to her father, who left messages in his head while he slept to pass along to his children. “We read an article in the LRB about the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. It described a Buddhist priest who was visited constantly by the spirits of the dead, even dogs. He was a doorway or a gateway to the afterlife, and when they found it, they put their traumas down on leaving. ‘I’m like him,’ Stephen told me. He had chronic nightmares, and he was thrown by their realism. Past lives, he wondered? It seemed unlikely. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it has nothing to do with me. I’m just a portal. And there must be a queue, as Tom hasn’t passed through it yet.’ It was a relief to him to realize it was other people’s horrors that rushed through him. It made no difference to them if he let them go, so let them go he did.”

“Tem is blameless,” she added, “but a child’s sense of things is close to mythic. Tim saved her by teaching her how to ground herself. And he married her off to the one man on earth besides him who understands her. Jack is her other ground and their house in Bayswater, their family, grounds them both, but she’s easily untethered, as you saw. She’s Tom’s own daughter in that respect, a day-at-a-time girl. Even her name is from him. The rest of us have Bible names, our mother’s family’s custom, but he chose a Greek goddess in propitiation. You’ll meet Demeter, Tem’s daughter, named in that same tradition.”

Tim had mentioned that Demeter, delayed by an academic conflict, was on her way, glad so many had stayed on. “Tom’s late writing, his notebooks, is her subject,” Catherine told her. “Elizabeth alludes to them in her biography of him, but she said they were beyond her.”

Elizabeth is 80, Lina is 56

She was unwell when Natalia and Ben wed, but learned that Catherine and Stephen had asked members of Ben’s family to stay on. This from Tim, who helpfully wrote out who was who. When she read it, Elizabeth telephoned him to say that she intended to visit if they could find a room.

A room was found. She took the train, fetched by Tim and Paola at the station where they’d all arrived. When they were introduced, Elizabeth surprised Paola by speaking animatedly to her in Italian. As she explained over the Lancia’s considerable interior noise, she was the translator of Caterina d’Este, the Ferrarese writer, great-grandmother of Jo’s Federico. She was writing her biography, so she knew a good deal about Paola’s family. She also knew from the keeper of Caterina’s archive that Lina had taken an interest in her.

Tim had spoken with Catherine to arrange for their oldest sister’s visit, but hadn’t bothered to tell the others, not realizing the connections Elizabeth described. “We’ll have to organize a dinner,” he said to Paola. “Oh, Lina will be in heaven,” she said. “Her dinners are legendary.”

With Paola as emissary, word quickly spread. Tim took it upon himself to ask Lina if she was up to cooking, but first he quizzed Catherine on the makings. “Lev has more than held up his end,” she said. “We could feed the county.” Lina was willing, as Paola predicted. Unable to resist, she called on Elizabeth, “hoping you’re not too tired from the journey.” She wasn’t. Shaking off her malady energized her and other people always did.

Lina expressed regret, stupidity even, for not asking her about Caterina, but her quest was so specific, trying to work out her parentage. Then she remembered the note she found. “Oh, yes, I found it too,” Elizabeth said, when Lina described it, “but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. My biography is literary — how she relates to Bassani, for example. I have a copy of the note, as it seemed important, but you know so much more about that whole thing. She certainly agonizes about sidestepping the racial law. We should write an article about it together. I’m also interested in the poetry of Luca Piranesi. I think it’s wonderful. I want to translate her selection. I gather there are shelves of it, but she seems to have been one of his close readers.”

Lina shuddered with excitement, describing how she sat at Luca’s desk in Piranesi’s harbor, asking him to give her whatever it is writers require. “Moxie is how I think of it,” Elizabeth said. “My father liked that word. I would very much like to see that archive for myself. We all write, as you may have heard, but translating from Italian is my other occupation. Literary biographies pay off the knowledge I acquire about these authors. Caterina is a personal favorite. That your daughter married her great-grandson is something, isn’t it?

Tipped off by Paola, Leo wandered in, and Elizabeth quizzed them both about Caterina. “Looking at those early photos of her in the archive, I felt she was striking, but as a child, I thought she was kindhearted but not easy to get to know,” Lina said. Elizabeth nodded. “One type of writer.”

Luca is 90 and then he’s 63

At breakfast, Lina told Elizabeth that she’d awakened in the night, remembering walking with Luca and Caterina in the Piranesi harbor. They were discussing the planned edition of Luca’s poems. “I listened, as I’d told Luca in Modena that I would get them published and make him famous. ‘You have my selection,’ Luca told Caterina. ‘I chose poems that stay clear of matters that might be painful to their readers if they’re still alive. I have no way to know, but here I am, so I can’t be sure.’ He gestured toward the building that houses his writing room. ‘There’s a second manuscript. It’s marked “Number Two.”’ I had forgotten this completely. There is no such manuscript in Piranesi, only the manuscript that Caterina put together, which is in Ferrara. Judging from the book, she must have ignored him and put the two manuscripts together. The poems she included stay clear of nothing, as far as I can tell. But we should go to Piranesi together, Elizabeth, and have a look. There may be other things worth surfacing.”

Leo appeared meanwhile. “I had a dream about Luca, so we must have drawn him here. We were at a different harbor, Buenos Aires, in 1950, so a Luca in late middle age, coming off what I imagine was his last affair. But this being a dream dreamt in 2024, we both were seeped in an awareness of how it all unfolded. We said less than what we thought, as if telepathic, and at different points we noticed a couple in the distance. I was unsure in the dream who they were, but when I awoke, I realized the woman was Mads, who shot herself in that season, whose death left me at loose ends. Luca told me that her doing so led me to meet Gianni and have Lina, so propitious in that sense. ‘You know this,’ he added, which is true. With her was an older man I couldn’t place, in his early fifties, and wet, as if he’d just been pulled out of the water. He figures in others’ destinies, which may be a role people play unknowingly, he added. It seems tragic, I thought, to those it affects directly, but it keeps the game going, the one our Etruscans take the time to chart. We’re more like the Mapuche, Luca said. We read children on arrival to learn their nature, then check in with them to see how it’s going. You’re an excellent recipient of these small pushes, he continued, as lucky as your father. And you have your uncle Paolo’s ability to make things happen, or perhaps you get this from Maria.”

“Is this what you’re writing?” Elizabeth asked Lina, who nodded. “It has many protagonists. Alive or dead, they surface one way or another and tell us their stories. But you need a roadmap or a family tree.” Then Catherine spoke up. “That was my father Tom with your Mads, Leo, two suicides who encountered each other thanks to our families gathering here. It may be helpful for both of them to see that it wasn’t entirely a mistake on their parts or that life folds it in, all of it yeast for the daily bread we continue to bake and put on the table, in remembrance of Him and them.” Leo bowed her head. “Amen, as I was taught to say. A good way to look at it.”

Dem is 34, Tom was 52

“Only my uncle Tim calls me Demeter,” Dem said. “My father calls me Demi and everyone else calls me Dem. Tim is enchanted by Paola, by the way. She’s as taken with his old Lancia as he is. We’re a family of arrangers, as you’ll discover.” Jo nodded. “So is ours,” she said.

Then Dem described her project. She’d enlisted Pen and Tim for their knowledge of sources for the quotations in her grandfather’s notebooks. “He admired Pound’s Cantos, and in this last phase, he let his own learning flood his pages. His published novels and poems throttled it back, the way Tim cushions texts in irony or jokes. Never straight on is one of the two ways our family operates, always straight on being the other. But the notebooks are brilliant, like Wittgenstein if Wittgenstein were a novelist.”

Lina listened intently. A small circle had gathered around “the beautiful Demeter,” as Tim had characterized her. “Like Homer,” Jo realized. “I wonder what he calls me?” Tem was calm again in the presence of her daughter. She was another reader of the notebooks, straight up as she lacked the learning Tim and Pen brought to them, and yet, Dem told Jo later, the most devoted to them, hanging on his words. “She dreams of him so often that I imagine they discuss the texts. Tem is dogged about time and texts both, and so familiar with Tom at this point that his visits lead to conversations rather than grief, although grief is always there. She and Jack’s love for us is so unconditional, it’s quite stunning. We are their lifework, along with the house and Jack’s gardens. It’s a gift, not a burden, as we never question why we’re here, the reason being very clear.”

She described the scheduling conflict that kept her from the wedding, “the usual stupidity of academia, but it’s the easiest way to do it, the surest route to publication for something so obscure, although my grandfather has a cult following and NYRB in New York is reprinting him.” A nod in Pen’s direction. “I took her as my model.”

Pen and Lina looked across at each other. “You go first,” Lina said. “It’s definitely an odd career,” Pen said. “As you say, it’s convenient where obscurity’s concerned, one of the few places where excitement is generated by new finds. I read that Tech is giving prizes now to speed things up. I should be grateful, as the old methods would outlive me.”

Lina asked Dem to say more about the notebooks. “The main issue is thematic. I theorize that he wrote to make sense of how the fates undid him, and to save himself, if possible. He loved his children as much as he loved Mary, but he was also mad with grief. It’s a miracle he lived another four years, but the family would have been dispersed had he not waited until Elizabeth could take it in hand. There was enough money, thanks to the settlement. His books alone wouldn’t have been enough. One was filmed, which was helpful. One book or another has stayed in print, but his work could be better known. I think it’s ripe for a revival, which spurs me to get my project done.”

Elizabeth took the floor. “Dem’s interest has prompted my own, and Tim and Pen have helped us both. They’re a thicket, those notebooks. He used a shorthand like Walser’s, which Pen cracked. And Pen has her father’s gift for reading into things, so it’s not as baffling as it was. When Dem’s done, I’ll give my biography a new chapter.”

Bren is 52, Trent is 60, Giulietta is 27

Giulietta felt her father belonged to a different world, despite her immense respect for his and Gianni’s work. Tatiana’s focus was closer to her own. The resistance that had dogged her since Leo recruited her lay here. When she said this Tatiana, she pushed back a little, as she had an affection for their work, yet she saw what Giulietta meant. “I think we live with media as weather now, aware of it but also ignoring it, often by necessity.”

At the river, Bren found Trent standing alone. “Lina told Jo how she and Ben were sparked,” she said. “There’s a part of her I will never understand.” Trent looked at her. “I will never forget it,” he said finally. “She wanted Jo to know she was desired,” Bren said. “Usually that’s a truism, but desire is a subject in your family. You could start a school.” Trent nodded. “We were also desired, Lina and me. Not everyone is, as you must see in your practice. In Ben and Jo’s case, desire was purposeful, better certainly than using a baster. We all wanted those babies. Fecundity is a marvelous drug. Luckily, our addiction to it was brief, as Genia foresaw. Her thoughts were dynastic, though, breeding for perpetuation. It runs in her family and if you get in its orbit, as Jo did, you’ll be pregnant in a fortnight.”

Tatiana liked Italians, and Genia came from deep stock, a family of kings, not just dukes. She saw this, even in the more exotic Giulietta. She was good at reading lineage in women, and ancient noble families were magnets for diversity. Leo too was interesting, an entrepreneur like her father, able like him to see things others missed and ambitious to do more. No surprise they hit it off. One of her mother’s roles in life was to put the next thing in front of Lev, give him that pat on the head Camille Paglia spoke of. Leo and her family were a stroke of luck, new territory. Tat might follow along to see where it led.

“Film is important the same way books are,” she added. “I mean, books may be ridiculous, and yet we write them and read them. There are many terrible films, but a great film is like a great book. Experiencing it does something to us. Trent and Gianni are masters at documentary. Nothing they ever did is less than wonderful. We have to honor that, even if we admit it’s strange to find it in our demented world, like noticing that a river actually has fish and isn’t just another cesspool.” She looked at them. “Let’s meet soon in Modena and sort this out. I also need a break. I too am oversaturated.”

Bren took Trent’s hand and kissed it. “Sometimes I dream about that hut. I read the journal of Lina’s ancestor, writing about her lover, and she says it only worked because they didn’t marry, they just knew each other.”

“Everything in its season,” Trent said, placing a hand on her shoulder.