Below the beauty of language genius, the tale takes over, enforced by the hammered word, leaving us dazzled and terribly moved.”

—WILLIS BARNSTONE, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Life Watch and The Gnostic Bible

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Ian Kleinert for believing in me against your better judgment. You laid the foundation. Thank you to Dan Smetanka for your sense of architecture. You taught me that a house can stand against itself. Thank you to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, my choir director. You taught me how to make that same house sing. Thank you to Laura Jorstad. You are a human house of correction. Thank you to Signe L. Pike. House warmer.

BOOK ONE

The Bridal Path

London, February 1963. New York All Along.

1.

Robert

A flatbed barge is roaring down Broadway with an American flag furling. The semi is on an empty run, returning from one of the fills upstate. I’m standing on the roof of Dodge Hall, Columbia University. I’m covered with bone dust. Candles are left to burn on the blacktop. They weep in sleepers’ windows. The night’s fires burn low as the city lies in bed, still awake. There are some Columbia kids on the street in tattered, laundry day clothing and rearward baseball caps. They are mocking the Spirit of ’76 battle corps. One of them has a pennywhistle; another, a marching drum. The last one conducts the wind. They pass, single file, beneath the bell tower of the Broadway Presbyterian Church. They fade out of view. The kids have captured the essence of music. Soloing musicians always elude the range of the senses. They dare the faculty of memory to define them. Poets are even more surreptitious. They are forever soloing. Harmony, for them, is a matter of isolation.