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Enemies: some of them former associates of Father’s, even friends of his and Mother’s, who’d betrayed him for political reasons; had perjured themselves in a campaign to vilify and destroy his career; had had a part in issuing warrants for his arrest.

Here are facts. We children knew little of them at the time, we had to piece them together afterward. For much was unknown to us. Much was
forbidden knowledge
.

In April of that year, shortly after his forty-fourth birthday, Judge Roderick Matheson, our father, was arrested in his chambers at the State Court of Appeals.

At the time of his much-publicized arrest the youngest of the eleven justices of the court and the one of whom the most brilliant future was predicted.

Roderick Matheson was kept for twelve days in “interrogative detention” in a state facility within a mile of the State Court of Appeals. He was allowed to see only his attorneys and his distraught wife.

Then, abruptly, he was released.

And made to resign his judgeship. And made to surrender to the state most of his accumulated savings and investments. So the family was plunged into debt. Virtually overnight, into debt. So he and Mother were forced to sell their house in the most prestigious suburb of the capital; and their summer cottage on the Atlantic coast in Kennebunkport, Maine; and all but one of their several cars; and their yacht; and Mother’s several fur coats; and certain items of jewelry; and other expensive possessions.
Why?
we children asked, and Mother said bitterly,
Because your father’s enemies are jealous of him, because they’re vicious men who’ve banded together to destroy him
.

We were forbidden to ask further questions. We were forbidden to see newspapers or newsmagazines, watch TV or listen to the radio. Immediately at the time of Father’s arrest we were taken by Mother out of our private schools and forbidden to communicate with even our closest friends by telephone or E-mail. Mother insisted we remain in the house; Mother insisted upon knowing where we were every minute and became hysterical if one of us was missing, furious when we returned. Home, she shut herself away from us to talk on the phone for hours. (To Father? To Father’s attorneys? To attorneys of her own? For it seemed for a while that there was a possibility of separation, divorce.) Mother’s high shrill plaintive demanding incredulous quavering voice raised as we’d never heard it before.
How can this be happening to me! I deserve better for God’s sake! I am innocent for God’s sake! And my children—what will their lives be, now?

We were spoiled, indulged children. We didn’t know it at the time, not even Graeme knew it at the time; of course we were spoiled, indulged, the children of rich, powerful, socially ambitious parents. Even the ten-year-old twins Neale and Ellen with their sweet, innocent faces and astonished eyes. Our privileged lives of clothes and computers and private lessons (tennis, ballet, horseback riding), our pride in knowing we were the children of Judge Roderick Matheson of whom so much was said; our lives so like play-lives, and not real lives at all; changed suddenly and irrevocably as the lives of children glimpsed on TV who have suffered natural disasters like earthquakes, famine, war. And so Father himself looked, when he returned to us, the shock of blond-brown hair on his forehead now laced with silver, his cheeks gaunt, his eyes glassy and his once-handsome mouth like something mashed, like one, formerly a prince, who has survived, but only just barely, a natural disaster.

We shrank from him, and from Mother. We were frightened of Mother’s changeable moods. For she might stare through us wide-eyed in fear and dismay, her once-beautiful hazel-green eyes swollen from weeping; or she might rush to embrace us, giving a little cry of pain—
Oh, oh! Oh, what will we do?
At such times Mother gave off a scent of sweet perfume commingled with perspiration; her breath smelled of—what? Wine, bourbon? Sometimes it was us, her children, whom she wished to comfort; at other times it seemed to be herself she wished to comfort; sometimes she was angry at Father, and sometimes at Father’s enemies; sometimes, for no reason we could comprehend, she was angry at us. Especially Rosalind, who at fourteen and a half, a lanky, long-limbed girl with frowning eyes, had a stubborn way of seeming to be thinking for herself, furrowing her brow and sucking at her lips, brooding silent in that space where even a mother can’t follow. So if Rosalind stiffened in Mother’s arms, nearly as tall as Mother now, Mother might lean back to sure into her face, gripping Rosalind’s shoulders with red-gleaming talon-sharp fingernails and pushing Rosalind from her—
What’s wrong with you? Why are you looking at me like that? How dare you look at me, your mother—like that!

Mother’s beautiful face like a mask. A porcelain-cosmetic mask. A mask that might shatter suddenly, like glass, if her blood beat too furiously in her veins.

So Rosalind shrank from her and crept away to hide in a corner of Cross Hill. Thinking never never never would she grow up to be so beautiful and so angry a woman.

But it was Father, so changed, who most frightened us. Where once Judge Roderick Matheson had been impeccably groomed, never allowing himself to be glimpsed in other than fresh-laundered clothes, his hair neatly combed, now he often wore rumpled clothes, ran his hands violently through his hair, shaved in such a way (we speculated) as to leave his skin pained, reddened; he was Father, still, and his face was Father’s much-photographed face, yet, it almost seemed, something older, rougher, ravaged sought to push its way through. His eyes, liquidy-brown, usually warm and ingratiating, had a dull glassy look; his mouth twisted as if he were arguing with himself.

Father was a hurt, innocent man. A man betrayed, hounded and persecuted by his enemies and by the “ravenous, insatiable, unconscionable media"—the reason we hadn’t been allowed to read newspapers or watch TV. Father was an angry man and, sometimes, we had to admit, a dangerous man. For, like Mother, he swung between moods: now distressed, now furious; now optimistic, now enervated; now grieving for his family, now grieving for himself and his blighted career; now youthful, vigorous, now an aging, embittered man.

In his speech-voice, at the dinner table, he might declaim, as if speaking to others, not just us,
Dear wife, dear children! Bear with me! We will return one day soon to our rightful lives. I will redeem the name of Matheson, I will redeem us all—that is my vow. I will seal it with—my blood
.

Face flushed with wine, eyes prankishly narrowed, Father might take up his fork and, before Mother could prevent him, stab it into the back of his hand as if stabbing a small hairless creature that had unaccountably crawled up beside his plate.

We flinched, but dared not cry out. What was required from us was a murmur—
Yes, yes Father
. For crying at such times generally displeased Father for its suggestion that, though we were children quickly murmured
Yes, yes Father
we did not truly believe our own words.

“It’s like he died after all, isn’t it? In jail. His eyes …”

It was after one of Father’s strange elated outbursts at the dinner table that Stephen uttered this remark in a drawling voice unlike his normal voice; Stephen whose life had been, until Father’s arrest, soccer, football, basketball, sports video games and the intense, rapidly shifting friendships of boy and girl classmates at his school; Stephen, handsome as Roderick Matheson had been as a boy, with his father’s broad face and sharply defined cheekbones.

Graeme shrugged and walked away.

Rosalind said something quick and hurtful to Stephen, called him an ignorant asshole, and walked away.

Lying then awake and miserable most of the night. Pressing her damp face into her pillow. Thinking
Can eyes die? A man’s eyes—die? And the rest of the man continue to live?
Through the interminable wind-haunted night like each night in this terrible place she hated, so lonely, so far from her friends and the life of Rosalind Matheson she’d loved; waking fitfully to see, as if he were crouched over her bed, the glassy, red-veined eyes of our father glaring at her out of the dark.

Dear God help him to prove his innocence. To clear his good name. Help him to restore himself to all that he has lost. Make us happy again, make us ourselves again, return us to our true home and make the name Matheson a name again of pride
.

3. By Crescent Pond

A sunny, wind-blustery morning! One of the grimy-paned windows in the breakfast room was cracked like a cobweb, and scattered tree limbs and debris lay on the terrace rustling like living, wounded things. “Where’s Graeme?” we asked one another.

“Where’s Graeme?” Mother asked with vexed, worried eyes.

For Graeme had not joined us at breakfast. He’d been awake before us, and dressed, and gone. So little Neale had said, wistfully.

Yet Graeme was somewhere in the house. Stubborn in resistance when we called: “Gra-eme! Where are you?”

Since our move to Cross Hill, his old life left behind, Graeme had been plunged into an angry melancholy. His expensive computer equipment could not function in this ruin of a house: there was inadequate wiring. Our parents’ large bedroom at the far front of the second floor, off-limits to us children, was said to contain a lamp with a sixty-watt bulb; and Father’s private office on the third floor contained a telephone, a fax, and one or two low-wattage lamps; though the lights frequently wavered and went out, and Father tried to use them sparingly. (Yet often Father worked through the night. He was involved in preparing extensive legal documents refuting the charges and innuendos made against him, to be presented one day to the state attorney’s office; he was also on the phone frequently with the single attorney still in his hire.) But Graeme’s new-model computer, plugged into one of the crude Cross Hill sockets, displayed a splotched gray screen with virtually no definition. Most of his programs and video games could not be operated. The Cross Hill cyberspace resembled a void; a vacuum; an emptiness like that of the atom, which is said to contain almost nothing; slow-drifting particles like motes in the corner of your eye. It was increasingly difficult to believe, Graeme thought, that such a phenomenon as “cyberspace” existed—anywhere. He’d resumed his E-mail, in defiance of Mother’s warning, but the messages he received from his several friends back in the city were strange, scrambled. One morning Stephen came upon Graeme in his room hunched over his computer keyboard, swiftly typing commands that led again and again, and again, as in a nightmare of comic cruelty, to
ERROR! SERVER CANNOT BE LOCATED
on a shimmering, fading screen. Stephen was shocked by the sorrow in his brother’s face. “Hey. Why don’t you let that stuff rest for a while? There’s other things we can do. Like bicycling. Into town …” But Graeme didn’t hear. He hunched his thin shoulders farther over the keyboard, rapidly typing out another complex set of commands. The luminous hieroglyphics on the screen floated slowly upward as if channeled from a very great distance through space and time. In the pale clotted light of the overcast June morning, Graeme’s adolescent skin had a peevish green cast, like tarnished metal; his eyes glistened with bitter bemusement. In disgust he said to Stephen, “Look.” Stephen looked: it was Graeme’s E-mail he was scanning, but each of the messages had something wrong with it, as if awkwardly translated from a foreign language, or in code:

graememat ± @ poor shit.///

howzit 2b ded!

“They think I’m dead,” Graeme said, choking back a sob. “The guys are talking about me like I’m dead.”

Stephen said quickly, “The message isn’t coming through right. Once we get more electricity—”

Graeme stabbed angrily at a key, and the E-mail vanished.

“Maybe I am dead. Maybe we all are, and buried at Cross Hill.”

Stephen backed off, shuddering. At such times he didn’t want to deal with his brother’s moods. He didn’t want to think
He knows so much more than I do, he’s so much smarter than I am
. He went to announce to the others, “Graeme’s getting weird over that computer shit. I think we should pull his plug.”

Then there came the morning they couldn’t locate Graeme, calling for him up- and downstairs; calling for him out the windows, out the terrace doors overlooking the grove of ragged Chinese elms, and the weedy graveled lane known as Acacia Drive (though most of the acacia trees had sickened and died). Mother, her ashy-silvery hair swinging about her face, her girl’s forehead lined with vexation and worry, cupped her hands to her mouth and cried, “Gra-eme! Graeme! Where are you hiding? I insist you come here—at once.” As if it was a game of hide-and-seek she might bring to an abrupt end. Yet, like Father, who spent most of his waking hours on the third floor of the house, Mother was reluctant to venture outside; she shaded her eyes to squint toward the outbuildings, the old carriage house and the stable and barns with their rain-rotted, collapsing roofs, and in the direction of murky Crescent Pond, which was at the bottom of the hill, beyond Acacia Drive; but some timidity, or outright fear, prevented her from seeking Graeme in such likely places. After ten days at Cross Hill during which time she’d seen no one outside the family except hired help from Contracoeur, Mother was still wearing expensive, stylish city clothes; dresses, skirts and sweaters, not jeans (perhaps she owned none?) but silk slacks with matching shirts, impractical sling-back Italian sandals with prominent heels. Each morning, on even the most oppressive of mornings, she’d bravely made up her heart-shaped face into that tight, beautiful mask; though the skin of her throat was pallid, beginning to show signs of age. She wore her wedding rings, her square-cut emerald ring on her right hand, her jeweled wristwatch that sparkled on her small-boned wrist. In a breathy, almost coquettish voice Mother complained, “That boy! Graeme! He does these things to spite me.”

We searched for Graeme all morning. By noon a fierce pale sun dominated the sky. How vast Cross Hill was, this “historic” estate that had gone to ruin; how many hiding places there were out-of-doors in the handsome old barns, in the rotting grape and wisteria arbors, in the evergreens bordering the house, and in the wild grasses, some of them as tall as five feet, in the park surrounding the house; in the derelict greenhouses through whose smashed windows black-feathered birds (starlings, grackles, crows?) rose hastily at our approach, like departing spirits of the dead. “Where is Graeme?” Rosalind shouted after them. “Where is he hiding?”