“I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling kindly and touching him briefly on the shoulder. He couldn’t make out her accent—Ohio, or Michigan perhaps, vowels trapped in her mouth, where they resounded as if in a small cave.
“It’s been many years,” Burling told her, “so it’s no longer fresh. Lately I’ve been trying to establish a . . . relationship, you know, but I’m of an older generation.”
“You’re not old, Mr. Burling.”
“Well, you’re kind, but in any event . . .”
“You want to know what a woman my age is looking for?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, for me,” she said, standing up and throwing out her hip, “I just want to travel, that’s all. I’ve lived in London, in Singapore, now I’m based in Seattle. Next year I’m hoping for Tokyo. If a man can’t deal with my wanderlust, too bad. I never wanted any kids.”
“They keep you guessing, that’s for sure.”
“You look like a father.”
Burling laughed. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Take it as a compliment.”
“I have a son and daughter, both grown now,” he told her. “When I was their age, I was like you, I wanted to see the world. As a result they grew up mostly overseas.”
“Lucky them.”
“I thought so, too, but they didn’t see it that way. My daughter wrote her graduate thesis on the trauma of being uprooted all the time.”
“I guess the grass is always greener.” She looked over her shoulder at the steward, who was manning the service cart. “Looks like we’re out of ice again. Excuse me.”
Just like that, she was gone, and Burling realized it had only been her job, to entertain his questions. He was ashamed of having kept her so long. As he ate, he wondered about her forthright nature, which he equated with independence, whether that was the kind of woman he should have chosen as a wife. In a way, he and Amelia were prisoners of their own generation, which had not allowed them much room to decide: the summer they met, 1956, all the children of their class in Philadelphia had the same script to follow. The dances and doubles matches and fumbling in the backseats of Chryslers each were scenes in a larger passion play, the final act of which was meant to unite the prominent families of Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy. Even if it was in his, and Amelia’s, nature to critique that play, wonder about what Betty Wilson and Whit Greene could possibly have in common beyond the fact that her father’s bank held the paper on the Greene’s family business—“What can they possibly talk about?”—Burling and the lively girl whose father called her Amie performed the scenes like everyone else. He was twenty, home from Princeton, working at the Evening Bulletin as a sports reporter. He professed to want to be a journalist, a war reporter or a foreign correspondent or, less likely given his earnest tendencies, a sportswriter, complete with cigar and newsprint staining his fingers. The way he talked about writers attracted her to him. Evenings on the terrace at the Cricket Club, or in the dimly lit study of her parents’ big stone house, discussing Hawthorne and Melville, his favorites, or Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, hers, would invariably end in a set piece of double entendres that led his hands inside her blouse. Consumed as he was, like all his contemporaries, with what kind of woman he would marry, what she would say while the dances and exaggerated talk swirled about them, and what she allowed him after, were enough to promise that their life together would take them on an exotic sort of mission, filled with intellect, purpose, and, certainly, sex.
It was agreed among their set that Lucius and Amelia would leave Philadelphia, destined for foreign capitals, Europe, or India. Amelia was a “live wire,” as her friends had it, and “easy to know,” as Burling’s mother said, which was not necessarily a compliment. Already, at seventeen, she had spent a month “away,” under a doctor’s care, and already, like her vastly successful Irish father, she liked to drink, harbingers of things to come. Her love of literature was more therapeutic than intellectual, but he was never very discerning when it came to psychology, any more than he had much taste for alcohol. Still, he liked to be around it, as he liked the clubs she took him to on South Street, downstairs places filled with smoke and trumpets and the steady war beat of traps, and actual blacks. Sometimes Amelia had pills in her handbag, but Burling demurred. He found that being the sober one gave him a reputation for character that people admired, even if they didn’t always seem to like him very much. It was there that he established his demeanor in the presence of alien cultures, and also, gradually, where he understood that he would not play professional basketball. Amelia, who knew nothing of sports, pointed it out to him. His realization that she was right led directly to a proposal, her recognition of his deficiency sealing the deal.
They were married three years later, following his military service, at the church on Germantown Avenue where both their mothers belonged, although the families came from different hemispheres of the same social world, faded blue blood on his side, new money on hers. Amelia’s father, the self-made Irish Catholic from a north Philly family of seven boys, of which he was the only alcoholic functioning enough to offer nominal employment to the other six, put on a reception that caused the mostly Protestant members of the club to mutter as they ate his food and drank more than their fill. He died two years later in the nineteenth hole, telling his foursome about the big house he had bought the couple on Macomb Street in northwest DC, and about his son-in-law’s job in the Kennedy administration, of which he was ignorant but exceedingly proud.
His only daughter took her father’s death to heart. His absence, like the demise of a benevolent despot, exposed the tensions that had always existed between the factions represented by Amelia and her mother, who was scornful and envious of the girl’s wild nature, her freedom, which the father had encouraged, and likely her beauty and sexual charms, of which he was also uncomfortably fond. Outwardly, the daughter railed against her mother’s false piety and weak manipulations, while at the same time she set about decorating the house in Cleveland Park with a near-curatorial fervor and making a baby with her husband, more than one if possible, to outdo the fragile older woman. It might have all worked itself out. The babies came, Elizabeth in 1963 and Lucius III in ’66, but Burling was barely at home anymore. What happened? If you compared the summer of 1956, when the Soviets rolled into Budapest, to 1979, when the same, slightly updated, tanks invaded Afghanistan, what came between was Vietnam.
“You want to make this a history lesson,” Amelia said, when he’d returned to take up residence in the guest room of the cavernous shingle-style house. Two months had passed since rebel soldiers—whether or not they were the tribe who had executed Breeden on the border, or the ones who had killed Wes Godwin before his eyes, no one at the Agency seemed able, or willing, to tell—moved dangerously close to the airport that lay on the plain north of Kabul. Burling himself was forced to go, leaving April, or the rumors of her, behind. “This is not about a war or a revolution. I don’t care about those things.”
“You used to,” he said with genuine remorse, for everything. “I realize I’m not entitled to sympathy.”
“I never cared about history, Lucius, or politics, either. You forget.”
“You cared about books. We used to talk about novels all the time. You loved Madame Bovary.”
“You’re sad,” Amelia said. She was sitting in the corner of their former bedroom, under a standing lamp, her delicate ankles crossed, bare legs folded against the flowery skirt of the slipper chair. “Besides, I can’t read novels anymore. They require a certain level of trust, certain assumptions about people.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said, warming to his idea. “Comparing 1956 to now is like comparing . . . Flaubert to Joyce, or Jane Austen to Faulkner.”
“Nice try, buster,” she said, twisting her mouth in a distorted smile, but in her eyes he saw encouragement. Perhaps his eloquence, which he was aware had mostly to do with the depth of his voice and the scale of his bearing, could save him. That morning his