She was shaking. I seated her in one of the plastic-covered chairs and heated water in the teakettle. She watched me dumbly while I rummaged through her cupboards looking for tea. When I found the Lipton bags tucked neatly into a canister, I made her a cup, mixing it well with sugar and milk. She drank it obediently in scalding gulps.

“Do you think you can tell me about Louisa now?” I asked when she’d turned down a second cup.

“How did you find out?” Her eyes were lifeless, her voice little more than a tired thread.

“Your brother’s son came to visit me this afternoon. Each time I’ve seen him I thought he looked familiar, but I put it down to years of looking at Art on posters or TV. But today Caroline was with me. She and I were in the middle of an argument. Young Art walked in with his face flushed, all agitated, and suddenly I realized how much he resembled Caroline. They might almost be twins, you know-I just hadn’t connected them before because I wasn’t expecting it. Of course he’s got that unearthly beauty and she’s always so disheveled, it wasn’t until they were both upset at the same time that you could really see it.”

She listened to my explanation with her face screwed up painfully, as if I were lecturing in Latin and she was trying to make me think she could follow me. When she didn’t say anything I prodded her a little.

“Why did you throw Louisa out of the house when she got pregnant?”

She looked at me directly then, some mix of fear and disgust on her face. “Keep her in the house? With that shame for all the world to know about?”

“It wasn’t her shame. It was Art’s, your brother’s. How can you even compare the two?”

“She wouldn’t have gotten-gotten in trouble if she hadn’t led him on. She saw how much he liked her to dance for him and kiss him. He-he had a weakness. She should have kept away from him.”

My nausea was so acute, it took all my will not to jump on her physically, to slam her body into the debris under the table. “If you knew he had a weakness for little girls, why the hell did you let him near your daughters?”

“He-he said he wouldn’t do it again. After I saw him-playing with-with Connie when she was five, I told him I would tell Ed about it if he ever did it again. He promised. He was afraid of Ed. But Louisa was too much for him, she was too evil-minded, she led him on against his own strength. When we saw she was going to have a baby, she told us how it happened and Art explained it to us, how she led him on against his own strength.”

“So you threw her out into the world. If it hadn’t been for Gabriella, who knows what would have happened to her? The two of you-what a couple of sanctimonious righteous bastards you are.”

She took my insults unflinchingly. She couldn’t understand why I would be angry over such logical parental behavior, but she’d seen me beat up her husband. She wasn’t going to risk exciting me.

“Was Art already married then?” I asked abruptly.

“No. We told him he was going to have to find a wife, start a family, or we’d have to tell Father Stepanek, tell the priest, about Louisa. We promised we wouldn’t say anything if she moved away and he started a family.”

I didn’t know what to say. All I could think of was Louisa at sixteen, pregnant, out on her own, the holy ladies of St. Wenceslaus parading in front of her door. And Gabriella riding in on her white horse to the rescue. All the old insults from the Djiaks about Gabriella’s being a Jew came back to me.

“How can you pretend to call yourselves Christians? My mother was a thousand times the Christian you ever were. She didn’t go around blathering a lot of sanctimonious bullshit; she lived charity. But you and Ed, you let your brother seduce your child and you call her wicked. If there really was a god he would annihilate you for daring to come to his altar, babbling about your righteousness. If there is a god, my only prayer is that I never have to be within a mile of you again.”

I lurched to my feet, my eyes hot with furious tears. She shrank back in her chair.

“I won’t hit you,” I said. “What good would it do either of us?”

Before I’d reached the hall she was already on her hands and knees cleaning up the broken glass.

I staggered from the house to the car, my stomach heaving, my throat tight and tainted with bile. All I could think of was to get to Lotty, not to stop for anything, for a toothbrush or a change of underwear. Just go straight to sanity.

I made it there on luck. A blaring horn at Seventy-first Street brought me briefly to myself I skirted my way carefully through Jackson Park, but I almost hit a bicyclist darting across the Drive at Fifty-ninth. Even after that I kept finding the speedometer needle around seventy.

Max was drinking cognac in Lotty’s sitting room when I got there. I smiled jerkily at him. With a great effort, I remembered the two had gone to a recital together and asked how they’d enjoyed the music.

“Superb. The Cellini Quintet. We knew them in London when they were just getting started after the war.” He reminded Lotty of an evening in Wigmore Hall when the power had gone off, and how the two of them had stood holding flashlights over the music so their friends could continue the concert.

Lotty laughed and was adding a memoir of her own when she broke off. “Vic! I hadn’t seen your face in the light when you came up. What is the matter?”

I forced my lips to the form of a smile. “Nothing life-threatening. Just a strange conversation that I’ll tell you about sometime.”

“I must be off anyway, my dear,” Max said, rising. “I’ve stayed far too long drinking your excellent cognac.”

Lotty saw him to the door, then hurried back to me. “What is it, Liebchen? You look like death.”

I tried smiling again. To my dismay, I found myself sobbing instead. “Lotty, I thought I’d seen every horrible thing people could do to each other in this town. Men killing each other for a bottle of wine. Women pouring lye on their lovers. Why this should upset me so much I don’t know.”

“Here.” Lotty put some brandy to my mouth. “Drink this and settle yourself a bit. Try to tell me what happened.”

I swallowed some of the cognac. It washed the taste of bile from my throat. With Lotty holding my hand, I blurted out the story. How I’d seen the resemblance between young Art and Caroline, and thought his mother must have been related to Caroline’s father. Only to learn that it was his father who was related to Caroline’s grandmother.

“That part wasn’t so awful,” I gulped. “I mean, of course it’s awful. But what made me so sick is their horrible scrubbed piety and the way they insist Louisa was to blame. Do you know how they raised her? How strictly those two sisters were watched? No dates, no boys, no talk about sex. And then her mother’s brother. He molested the one girl and they let him stay around to molest the other. And then they punish her.”

My voice was rising; I couldn’t seem to control it. “It can’t be, Lotty. It shouldn’t be. I should be able to stop something that vile from going on, but I don’t have any power.”

Lotty took me in her arms and held me without speaking. After a time my sobbing dried up, but I continued to lie against her shoulder.

“You can’t heal the world, Liebchen. I know you know that. You can only work with one person at a time, in a very small way. And over the individuals you help you have much effect. It’s only the megalomaniacs, the Hitlers and their ilk, who think they have the answer for everyone’s life. You are in the world of the sane, Victoria, the world of the limited.”

She took me into the kitchen and fed me the remains of the chicken she’d cooked for Max. She continued to pour brandy into me until I was ready for sleep. After that she took me to her spare room and undressed me.