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And what they call the bird that asks about whipping when the sun goes down is what Eliza and I called it when we were children. It was a correct name which we had learned from a dictionary.

We treasured the name for the superstitious dread it inspired. The bird became a nightmare creature in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch when we spoke its name. And, whenever we heard its cry, we spoke its name simultaneously. It was almost the only occasion on which we would speak simultaneously.

“The cry of The Nocturnal Goatsucker,” we would say.

• • •

And now I hear Melody and Isadore saying that, too, in a part of the lobby where I cannot see them. “The cry of the Nocturnal Goatsucker,” they say.

• • •

Eliza and I listened to that bird one evening before my departure for Cape Cod.

We had fled the mansion for the privacy of the dank mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

“Whip poor Will?” came the question, from somewhere out under the apple trees.

• • •

Even when we put our heads together, we could think of little to say.

I have heard that condemned prisoners often think of themselves as dead people, long before they die. Perhaps that was how our genius felt, knowing that a cruel axeman, so to speak, was about to split it into two nondescript chunks of meat, into Betty and Bobby Brown.

Be that as it may, our hands were busy—which is often the case with the hands of dying people. We had brought what we thought were the best of our writings with us. We rolled them into a cylinder, which we hid in an empty bronze funerary urn.

The urn had been intended for the ashes of the wife of Professor Swain, who had chosen to be buried here in New York, instead. It was encrusted with verdigris.

Hi ho.

• • •

What was on the papers?

A method for squaring circles, I remember—and a Utopian scheme for creating artificial extended families in America by issuing everyone a new middle name. All persons with the same middle name would be relatives.

Yes, and there was our critique of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and an essay on the nature of gravity, which concluded that gravity had surely been a variable in ancient times.

There was a paper, I remember, which argued that teeth should be washed with hot water, just like dishes and pots and pans.

And so on.

• • •

It was Eliza who had thought of hiding the papers in the urn.

It was Eliza who now put the lid in place.

We were not close together when she did it, so what she said was her own invention: “Say goodbye forever to your intelligence, Bobby Brown.”

“Goodbye,” I said.

• • •

“Eliza—” I said, “so many of the books I’ve read to you said that love was the most important thing of all. Maybe I should tell you that I love you now.”

“Go ahead,” she said.

“I love you, Eliza,” I said.

She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.”

“Why not?” I said.

“It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, ‘I love you, too’?”

“You don’t love me?” I said.

“What could anybody love about Bobby Brown?” she said.

• • •

Somewhere outside, out under the apple trees, the Nocturnal Goatsucker asked his question again.

20

ELIZA DID NOT come down to breakfast the next morning. She remained in her room until I was gone.

Our parents came along with me in their chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine. I was their child with a future. I could read and write.

And, even as we rolled through the lovely country-side, my forgettery set to work.

It was a protective mechanism against unbearable grief, one which I, as a pediatrician, am persuaded all children have.

Somewhere behind me, it seemed, was a twin sister who was not nearly as smart as I was. She had a name. Her name was Eliza Mellon Swain.

• • •

Yes, and the school year was so structured that none of us ever had to go home. I went to England and France and Germany and Italy and Greece. I went to summer camp.