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By Root 609 0

— having realized that his laundered and line-dried blazer wouldn’t do for a gala cocktail party. He had no idea what he would say to Kennedy, that defrocked priest. A man all the more engaging, Thomas thought, for his trials and tribulations, far more interesting than he’d have been without them, even with that prodigious legacy. Kennedy wouldn’t remember him; Thomas had been only eighteen or nineteen when he’d met the man. It was after Jack had died — Robert, too, for that matter — power distilled and concentrated in the one remaining brother. Thomas’s father — closet Catholic within the household tyranny of his mother’s aggressive Calvinism — did penance by way of politics, raising large sums of money from unlikely Democrats, wealthy bankers and entrepreneurs from the South Shore of Boston. Sums large enough to warrant gratitude and a royal visit. Thomas, summoned by his father, had come home from school — Cambridge no great distance from Hull — and had watched the senator at dinner and been rendered nearly mute by the obvious lack of any political fiber of his own.

On his writing desk, anchoring a corner of the bedroom, the Kisii stone box sat brazenly, as if naked. He’d picked it up on safari, he’d told Regina. When Rich bought that figure of a woman, remember? Yes, Regina thought she might remember. The box had arrived with a tiny chip in it, which made it all the more dear to Thomas — why, he couldn’t have said; the imperfection, he supposed, causing it to seem like something Linda had used. He’d thought, briefly, of hiding the box and putting her letters in it, a foolish idea he’d abandoned in the next instant, knowing a hidden box would almost certainly invite inspection. He’d put the letters in the one place Regina would never look for them — amongst the hundreds of pages of the drafts to his poems, his poetry being just about the last thing Regina would want to poke through. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate Thomas’s gifts; she did, in her way. It was just that poetry bored her, the repetitious drafts of the poems tedious beyond endurance.

They were waiting for the rains. The country so dry now it seemed to crackle. They said that cattle were dying and that soon the reservoirs would be empty. Already, there were headlines: WATER CRISIS SHUTS HOTELS . He’d begun, like everyone else, to dream of rain, to lift his face to it in his sleep. Unifying the country in a way nothing else quite could do (or couldn’t do at all); the mzungus and the Asians and the warring tribes all searching for a stray cloud, ready to celebrate with cocktails or dancing in the bush the minute the skies opened up. It was atavistic the way the longing got under the skin and into the bones, so that nothing seemed quite so luxurious as water falling from the heavens. The dust was everywhere — on his shoes, on the dogs (red with murram sometimes), in his nostrils, in his hair. Water was rationed to one bathtub a day. Thomas had taken to sponge baths to give Regina a half-tub of it at least. Though sometimes he’d ask her not to drain the tub so that he could get a good wash (washing in the leavings of someone else’s water just about the height of intimacy, he thought). He’d planned in fact to do that today, in preparation for the party, but Regina was so late — it was already half past five — he wondered if he oughtn’t to just draw a bath for himself, give Regina the leavings, which seemed, on second thought, in that dry season, unchivalrous in the extreme.

Would they be giving baths at the Norfolk? He thought of Linda in a hotel room with boyishly handsome Peter, getting ready for the party. He couldn’t see her as calm, though he wanted to; instead, he saw her on the verge of tears. Her letters had an odd, desperate quality that worried him; she seemed to be unraveling faster than he was, if such a thing were possible. Their situation was intolerable — more than intolerable, it seemed dishonorable, as though by staying with Regina, and she with Peter, they lacked honor or courage. But that soon would have to change. Though he dreaded the