"What the hell are you talking about?" Rachel said, turning back from the door and going to stand right beside him. Niolopua didn't avert his gaze. He stared right up at her with something very close to hatred on his face.

"You don't think about what you do to him, do you?"

"Him?"

"It's not like there's ever any love."

"Him."

"Yes. Him."

"Galilee?"

"Yes! Of course!" Niolopua said, as though she was an imbecile for asking the question. "Who the hell else would it be?" There were tears in his eyes now: of rage, of frustration. "My mother was the only one who ever loved him.

The only one!" He looked away from Rachel, and tears dropped from his eyes onto the wooden steps. "He built this house for her."

"Galilee built this house?" Niolopua nodded, still not looking up. "When?"

"I don't know exactly. A long time ago. It was the first house to be built on this shore."

"That can't be right," Rachel said. "He's not that old. I mean he's what, forty? If that."

"You don't know what he is," Niolopua said. There was a measure of pity in the remark, as though Rachel's ignorance was more profound than a lack of information.

"So tell me," she said. "Help me understand."

Niolopua took a mouthful of beer. Stared at the ground. Said nothing.

"Please," she said softly.

"All you want to do is use him," came the reply.

"You've got me wrong," she said. He didn't respond to this. At last she said: "I'm not like all the rest, Niolopua. I'm not a Geary. Well… no that's not true… I married a man I thought I loved and his name happened to be Geary. I didn't realize what that meant."

"Well, my father hates you all. In his heart, he hates you."

"Your father being?" She paused, realizing the answer. "Oh Lord. You're Galilee's son."

"Yes. I'm his son."

Rachel put her hands over her face and sighed into her palms. There was so much here she didn't comprehend: secrets and anger and sorrow. The only thing she grasped with any certainty was this: that even here, even in paradise, the Gearys had done their spoiling. No wonder Galilee hated them. She hated them too. At that moment she wished every one of them dead. A little part of her even wished herself dead. There seemed to be no other way out of the trap she'd married into.

"Is he coming back?" she said after a time.

"Oh yes," Niolopua replied, his voice monotonal. "He knows his responsibilities."

"To whom?"

"To you. You're a Geary woman, whether you like it or not. That's why he's with you. He wouldn't come otherwise." He glanced up at her. "You've got nothing he needs."

He was being cruel for the satisfaction of it, she knew, but the words stung her nevertheless.

"I don't need to listen to this," she said, and leaving him on the steps to drink his warm beer, she went back into the house.

It's no accident that events of great significance, when they happen, do so in clusters; it's the nature of things. Having been a gambling man in my youth, I know from experience how this principle works, for instance, in a casino. The roulette table suddenly becomes "hot"; there's win after win after win. And if you happen to be at the right table at the right time then the odds are suddenly tipped spectacularly in your favor. (The trick, of course, is to sense the moment when the table cools, and not to keep betting beyond that point, or you'll lose your shirt.) Observers of natural phenomena large and small, astronomers or entomologists, will tell you the same thing. For long periods-millions of years in the life of a star, minutes in the life of a butterfly-nothing of moment seems to happen. And then, suddenly, a plethora of events: convulsions, transformations, cataclysms.

Of course it's the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they're happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly-all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.

If we think of the Geary family as a single entity, then the first of the events that would transform it had already taken place: Rachel and Galilee had met. Though much of what happened in the next few days had, at least superficially, nothing to do with that meeting, it seems from a little distance that everything else was somehow precipitated by their liaison.

I don't entirely discount the possibility. Any feeling as profound (and as profoundly irrational) as the passion which moved these two has consequences; vibrations, which may begin processes utterly remote from it.

In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In its throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.

All of this was by way of preparing you for how things proceeded with the Gearys in a short space of time following Galilee's encounter with Rachel: how all at once a system that had survived and prospered for a hundred and forty years came apart at the seams in forty-eight hours.

For those who knew Cadmus Geary well the most certain sign of his sudden deterioration was sartorial. Even though he'd had bad, and sometimes extended, periods of ill health from his early eighties on, he had continued to pride himself on the way he looked. This had been a preoccupation since childhood. There's a photograph taken of him when he was barely four years old in which he presents himself like a little dandy, clearly proud of his perfectly pressed shirt and his immaculately polished shoes. He'd more than once been mistaken for a homosexual, which never troubled him. He'd laid more women that way.

Today, however, he refused his freshly laundered clothes; he wanted to stay in his pajamas, he declared. When his nurse, Celeste, gently pointed out that he'd soiled them in the night he replied that it was his shit and he liked its company. Then he demanded to be taken downstairs and put in front of the television. The nurse complied, and called in the doctor. Cadmus would have nothing to do with being examined however. He told Waxman to go away and leave him alone. Noncompliance, he warned, would result in a withdrawal of all funds made by the Geary family or any of its trusts to medical research, along with Waxman's retirement bonus.

"He still sounds like the Cadmus we all know and love," the doctor told Loretta. "Do you want me to try again?"

Loretta told him not to bother. If there was some worsening of her husband's condition she'd call. Much relieved the good doctor duly did as Cadmus had demanded and went away, leaving the old man to sit on the sofa and watch baseball. After an hour or so Loretta brought some food in: soup, half a toasted bagel and some cream cheese. He told her to set it down on the table, and he'd get to it later. Right now, he said, he wanted to watch the game.

"Are you feeling all right?" she asked him.

He didn't take his eyes off the screen, though his features showed not a flicker of interest in what was going on. "Never better," he said.

She set the tray down on the table. "Could I get you something different… maybe some fruit?"

"I've already got the shits, thank you," he said politely.

"Some chocolate pudding?"

"I'm not a child, Loretta," he said. "Though I realize it's a very long time since I proved it to you. I'm sure you're getting a good fucking from somebody-"