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“Hello, Dad,” she said. “How’d the game go?”

Michael laughed, gave her a hug. “As if you didn’t know.”

Shel handed her a box of popcorn. “For you, love,” he said.

She kissed him. “Dinner in about forty minutes.”

Michael looked out at the Atlantic. “What have you been doing all day, Helen?”

“Watching the kids.” A sailboat was tacking with the wind. It was carrying two boys. Teenagers.

“The Kennedys?” Michael asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Michael studied them for a moment. Joe and Jack. “It’s good to see them enjoying themselves,” he said.

EPILOGUE

ASPASIA showed up for the Riverside Theater’s opening-night performance of Achilles. She was accompanied by Rod Connelly, who was an instructor at the Starlight Dance Studio, and by Harvey Barnard and his wife, Amanda.

Riverside had a full house. It was not necessarily an auspicious start because Riverside always had a full house, and it was a small theater. Rod, of course, knew the claims that had been made for the source material, and, as one would expect, he didn’t believe a word of it. Furthermore, he had made no secret of the fact that he’d come principally to please Aspasia. “I’ve seen a couple of Greek plays,” he said, with evident distaste. “They took my high-school class to see one, I forget what it was, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

The other one had been staged at the University of Pennsylvania years before. And, though Rod didn’t directly say so, it was clear that his presence once again had been to please a young woman. Or maybe to impress her. In this latter instance, at least, he remembered the title, if not the dramatist. It had been The Acharnians. By, of course, Aristophanes.

Rod was adamant about people who’d send somebody an armload of Greek literature. “They won’t tell you who they are. That means they’re con artists. Trying to get away with something. If I were you, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with these things.”

Harvey’s attitude wasn’t much more positive. “It’s just too good to be true,” he said. Amanda cautioned him with stern looks to be careful. Don’t hurt Aspasia’s feelings.

Aspasia didn’t really believe it either. Still, she wanted to believe. And it was an exhilarating experience to settle into her seat, open the program, and see the title, Achilles, and, where the byline would normally be found: Thought to be by Sophocles.

And there was the cast, Trainor, Polyxena, Paris, and Apollo, and, of course, Achilles, actually about to come alive.

Riverside was a theater-i n-the-r ound. They had good seats, up close. The stage was decked with plants and dominated by a doorway. The program identified it as the exterior of Apollo’s chapel outside Troy.

THE lights came on, and the chorus began a dolorous chant. Achilles made his entrance.

As the show proceeded, Aspasia tried to be skeptical. Achilles was perhaps too trusting of his longtime enemies, Polyxena too ready to give in to her lover’s determination to risk everything in a meeting with Paris. Trainor, the priest, might not have been sufficiently respectful of the greatest of the Greek warriors. But she could find no fault with Paris. He was utterly torn between what he perceived as his obligation to the slain Troilus, and to Troy itself, and his repugnance at betraying his sister and ambushing a victim who trusted him.

During the climax, he enters, with a longbow over one shoulder, and tries to opt out. “What if the bolt does not take him down?” he asks the audience, while presenting an arrow for their inspection.

He is on the verge of abandoning the effort when Apollo steps out of the shadows. “I am with you,” the god says. “Have no fear.”

And, as Achilles enters the chapel, the audience sits riveted.

THE play ends with Trainor kneeling over Achilles’ body while Paris retreats into the darkness. Polyxena produces a knife, which she will use on herself. The chorus closes out, and, for a few moments, after the last actor has left the stage, the audience is mute. Gradually, people begin to applaud.

When