In Season by John J. Parman

In Season

John J. Parman

August is 44

In the country, at his aunt Pen's family's house, so with his cousins, offspring of her and Tim, his mother's friend, known since childhood, now his uncle, and his sisters. Catherine, one of the sisters, is the doyenne of Tim's family's away-from-London outpost. She took it over when the siblings were orphaned. It had been the parent's retreat. She later married Stephen, local to these parts, and raised their children here. Ancient and rambling, it had benefited from Tim's ability to fix almost anything and from August's aFention to it as a specialist in this sort of thing. Banking, his father's line of work, struck him as too all-consuming. Architecture shared that quality, but August decided after taking his degree to apprentice at a small, bespoke practice. That he spoke Russian poetically, as his mother observed, learned by accompanying her as she mixed with expats of that country, turned out to be useful, as they showed up in England as clients. His mother helpfully sorted the benign from the malign, tapping her vast network, a task she was rumored to carry out for M16, but she never said. So, he gained a clientele, eventually taking over the practice. Entertainers and others for whom the cachet of these old places, in town or country, is appealing also became his clients through that venerable process, word of mouth, helped by mentions in the weekend supplements arranged by his wife and business manager, Prudence. He and Tim were close, a kind of second father as well as an uncle when he married Pen, acquiring Constance and her husband as family, a situation that proved satisfactory. His parents' marriage was very much a product of its era. Of all her rumored lovers, again never formally confirmed, Tim alone won her trust and lasting affection.

This odd age, August thought. To be 44 is a midpoint of some sort, the numbers unlucky in Chinese terms, but pointing toward that lucky duo, 88. He had Chinese clients too, their superstitious natures living side-by-side with an innate materiality, just as an often-exquisite aesthetic sense was mixed with occasional garishness. He sometimes had to arrange for a street number to be altered, not to mention the directives of their flown-in feng shui advisors. He took it all in stride. At Kronenhalle with a Zurich client, seeing a Russian dilute his wine with Coca-Cola typified the risk. Catherine and Stephen's house was another maFer. It was a literary sort of place, despite Stephen's country roots. Like any married couple with profound differences, they divided things up spatially, the outbuildings his domain; the garden their long and very real collaboration; and all within mostly hers, excepting the mudroom. A dormitory housed the children. A wing of rooms sharing a bath took in "occasional" adults, while the season's regulars claimed their traditional places. August could trace his evolution across the decades, now finally a regular, like Tim and Pen. He earned his keep by dealing with whatever Stephen or Tim couldn't handle on their own, like retiling the roofs or shoring up an old foundation. He slowly brought the house into the 21st century, insulating walls and windows, rewiring, replacing, upgrading. Much was left untouched on the older men's behalf, along with the cranky tractor and Tim's beloved old Lancia they kept in running order. "They will bury him in that car," Pen noted. Likely true. Forty-four is an age of uncertainty, August reflected. Would he too face the perils that dog midlife? It's always a question, and you're never really sure how it will be posed.

Prudence is 36

She had two daughters. Prudence wondered about having a third. She knew so many couples who stopped at two, but she liked them toddling around, despite the disruption they wrought on the household. The girls were now six and four, so their sister—she assumed it would be a girl— would go through life seven years behind the oldest. August left such maFers to her. He was a good father by nature, having had to fight for aFention as a child. His mother tried to compensate for her husband, busy making the fortune that kept them all solvent, but she was equally distracted. August was as close to her sister, Penelope, as he was to her husband Tim. Between them, they filled in as parents. Yet his real parents were benign in their own way. One aspect of this was Constance's insight that being sent off to boarding school, particularly his father's, would be a disaster for August. She let him stay in London as a day student, offering her daughters the same choice. Some went away, some stayed, but leaving it to them avoided the neuroses a family's impositions can stamp on its children. The end result, thus far, was August at 44. This season brought them to the country, his sentimental journey. She didn't resent it. Tim's sisters thought she was a good match for August, and they loved her daughters. The girls loved them in turn and reveled in the country. August taught them to swim. He pointed out the hazards of country life, but always anecdotally, making himself Exhibit A of what not to do and why. "You'd never be so stupid," he'd add, thanking Providence for sparing him yet again. He was very good at what he did, but not much good at other things on which his practice depended. It was therefore lucky that Prudence could do them in her sleep.

Like a film company, they pulled people in as a project needed. Bespoke, and large enough to be sequential not overlapping, the work took the time it took. He was clear about this, because the age of these houses ruled exactitude out re: cost and schedule. Yet August knew such houses inside-out and had an encyclopedic mind for artisans and suppliers. They too were handed around, and August was intensely loyal and generous in his referrals, provided they held up their end. Friendship was his golden rule, and he made friends of his clients, also, having a sixth sense about them and the confidence (and wherewithal) to say no. She left all this to him, but made it her business to understand the mechanics of the clients' family offices, whatever it took to stay current and make sure everyone else was paid. She also arranged the photoshoots and coordinated the profiles of these great and good, anxious to show off what they'd wrought, and saw to it that August was mentioned. Every wife needs a wife. His librarian, as he called her, hired out of Central St. Martin's, combined a thoroughness with anything handed her and a demeanor that would melt a banker's heart, she saw. The clients loved her, ringing her up just to hear her voice. She was unfazed by their aFentions, having pledged her heart to a schoolmate, a relationship for the record books. Emma and Gemma, dubbed Em and Gem by Tim and his sisters, also came down in the season, staying in a nearby coFage Prudence rented for them and coming over for meals. So, in short, a third daughter was possible. When they were in the country, the girls mixing with their cousins, it always seemed like a good idea. This will repeat, Tim told her, noting that her second and first shared a birth month.

Lev, God help him, is 83

Brunel was his given name, a matrilinear connection to the great engineer resonating with his mother, but in his rugby days he was dubbed "The Leviathan," or Lev for short, and it stuck. Even his mother eventually gave in. As soon as he could, he made his way to The City, where he acquired a reputation for sensing the flow of things. Much later, one financial journalist compared that flow to climate change and credited Lev's ability to spot the broader shifts earlier than his peers. His fortune wasn't in the tycoon league, but substantial. Married to Constance, whose only real luxury was dresses, he avoided the baggage his peers acquired. A house large enough for her and their children, yes, but as the well-educated daughter of moderns, she forewent livein help, did her own shopping, gave the household a loose but effective order, bred admirably good-looking offspring. Her passion was contemporary Russian poetry, so a lot of expat Russian poets, but always held at a distance. She put up with his work habits, relatively all-consuming except on holidays, which he took religiously. He spent lavishly on those occasions, being to his mind far cheaper than owning a house and pool in Italy or France. It provided variety and avoided an encumbrance, both fundamental to his thesis, arrived at early on: stay open, preserve capital, and be as unsentimental as possible about any investment. A house for the family's all that's needed. Cars are functional. He used public transit whenever possible, or cabs. He joined no clubs, sought no honors, backed no parties. He left philanthropy to Constance, popular with the doyennes. He loved what he did. He had endless patience. He enjoyed the scrum that trading often was, but his rugby days were long over. Years passed. His coups were noted.

Not that he ever said anything. The ones who noticed were what he thought of as the forensics, journalists who keep score in a longer sense, interested in who's still there when one crisis or another culls the herd. They also noticed that whatever herd was drawing momentary aFention, he wasn't part of it. And he stood out physically, of course. It wasn't accidental, "The Leviathan." He looked the part, and there were still men in The City who could aFest to their fear of him on the pitch. Like others with that background, he was gentle, hugely tolerant, innately polite and kind in any other seFing. Despite his absences, his children loved and defended him because of this. In a way, Constance's absences bothered them more, her tendency to drift away, leaving them to Margaret, the oldest daughter and her aide-de-camp, and Genevieve, the French widow she employed in the daytime so an adult would be present. August, the most devoted to her, sometimes came along, refusing as a child to be left at home. He inherited Brunel's engineering prowess, channeled into the derelict manors and Georgian terrace houses he restored, Lev observed. His reputation as a seer led now to invitations to speak that he consistently turned down, but he did accept a lunch with the FT, liking the journalist. Lev ate sparingly, tuning his consumption by noticed girth and mental clarity, so he suggested that they meet at the V&A café, which he liked. His host marveled at the bill later in the published story. It was a moment, he said, when money could be made, but it took a lot of concentration to do so, like walking in rainfall. Lev liked to walk. Seasonally aFuned, aware of the small changes to one neighborhood or another, he made his way. As he worked alone, the pandemic barely aﬀected him.

Constance is 76

It caught her off guard, Jane Birkin's death. As Jo Ellison wrote, she was on a million mood boards. Constance never fell in with the fashions Birkin wore so readily, but Serge Gainsbourg struck her as similar to the band of pirates she befriended in the late-Samizdat era, when the poets filtered into London, choosing it over Israel as a place of exile. The same louche type. Birkin was quoted as saying she would never have left her husband had he not run off, which she also admired. Loyalty to Lev was absolute with her, yet it was a loyalty on her own terms. Birkin was loyal to a point, but she did ultimately desert Gainsbourg. Constance knew that it would be a grievous error to bed these poets, and Lev was unwavering in his devotion, second only to his work in The City, a nearly all-consuming activity that he would drop altogether when they went on holiday. It was then and only then that they bred, as she thought of it. He was a large man. A friend returning from Tokyo once recounted seeing a Sumo wrestler lunching with his tiny girlfriend and wondering how they did it. "Carefully," she said, and this was true of her and Lev. It was the opposite with a series of lovers, of which Tim, now remarkably her brother-in-law, was the last and most memorable. Just when her desire for him seemed like it might overwhelm her, a holiday with Lev gave her Tatiana, her youngest. A break from Tim turned into an ending of sorts, but then a walk in the park brought him together with Pen, a lucky event for all of them. Tim and Pen were perfectly suited, and Tim slid into the role of brother-in-law without a hitch. Lev admired his wit and his ability to fix almost anything. He also loved Tim's family, as did their children. While sharing many traits. they had beguiling idiosyncrasies.

Constance was Constance in her own mind. She had no specific calling, but her mind was capacious. Tim was aFentive to it, both before and after their liaison. He knew how much she knew, as did those Russian poets. She was someone to reckon with, the man at M16 said to her once. They would call on occasion, "just to talk." Her instinct was the reason, as August too had observed. Give her a Russian and she knew immediately if he could be trusted or not. It was unclear to her why this was, but it was unfailing. Only the men, but their women were often a confirming sign. Lev stayed clear of anything Communist. His dislike of fascism was laid down in his childhood, but the emergence of Stalin's and then Mao's treachery made an impact. The drift back that Xi represented was one of his coups, but his exposure to China was nil. He took Constance's word that her poets were good. He liked "Bratsk Dam" in translation. Editors were always after her to do translations, but she was no poet. She did help translators out, and would tell an editor based on a passage or two that a translation was likely sound or dodgy. She spoke it and heard it, but rarely read it and almost never wrote it. It came naturally to her, she discovered, this odd language, so much so that she could play with it, parody it, amuse her poet friends. It was one thing she and Tim had in common, this ability to hold quantities of speech or text in mind, then riff on it. He was wildly funny, if "wildly" could even be used for Tim, in the interludes of their lovemaking, and she learned a lot from him about improvising as a form of paying aFention. Lev knew The City intimately. He could mimic every type finance aFracted. He felt more heed should be given to the nuances of their talents, far too often squandered.

Tem and Jack are 66 and 76

The breeding room, as they called it, was now the room in which Tem wrote her novels and short stories. There was a daybed and it got occasional use. Tem had Jack's number. Retired from The City, he tended his several gardens. One was the kitchen garden he planted for Tem early on, a joint project. The other was his longstanding involvement with Stephen's country house domain, for which he was patron and over time as valued a participant as Tim, owing to his facility with plants of all sorts and an instinct for landscape as fields, kitchen gardens, and informal gardens that grow out of a house and extend its domesticity into nature in its different forms. Woods and water were part of it, and Jack loved to swim and fish. He was in his element completely, Tem observed, a boy again, unfeFered by city life, and the boys she and the others bred took to him as they looked to Tim to teach them his mechanical skills or apply them if they lacked them uFerly. The girls audited these sessions. She sometimes contrasted the children's lives with their own, set sidewise by life when a parent or parents expired. Jack loved his father, who died unexpectedly when he was seven. His mother never remarried. She had money, along with what his father left them. Sent away to school, he summered in Bayswater in the only house he knew. When his father was alive, they summered with his family in the country, but that ended. He saw his cousins occasionally, but his mother was as set sidewise by his father's death as he was. Without meaning to, his family triggered her grief. They realized it, minimizing their encounters, but Jack took the brunt of the separation. Marriage, children, children's children, a place in the country, throngs of cousins—all of this gave him back what he'd lost and sorely missed.

Tem's fiction was like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, one reviewer put it, and she could see that, but then he added that Katherine Mansfield haunted the proceedings. There was a bit of hocus-pocus in Warner, Tem reflected, but she was pleased with the Mansfield comparison. Like Tim, her work was noticed and sold well. They both had followings and were sometimes paired, their fate since childhood, but it seemed unjustified by the work itself, which was entirely different, viewed from within. Tim had what he called an observation engine, absorbing copious swathes of daily life and then working them up as dialogues, mostly, and their incidentals, usually surfaced in the back and forth. Tem too had a holistic memory, but strongly visual. She didn't go as far as Elizabeth Bowen with her scenes, being a minimalist like Tim, who would describe a woman as beautiful and get on with it, like a Cavafy poem, but she felt the details maFered. (They did maFer to Tim, she reflected, but only if they maFered to the person speaking, as with Constance in his first book, commenting on a dress's provenance, one of the things that gave her away, she felt, reading it, and yet Constance would likely have been annoyed if Tim hadn't noted it. It really did maFer to her, with her dresses.) Tem took to the role of banker's wife. Their Bayswater parties were sought after, not least owing to her cooking, but she was also a stunner in her prime. His colleagues wondered how Jack managed to land her, never suspecting how it actually went. Loathing dating, reticent, wounded by parental deaths, they needed a push. Tem had met Jack and was set on him, so Tim stepped in, as he always did, but he knew his sister, knew Jack, beFer than themselves.

Pen is 70 and Tim is 76

"I am emerita," Pen said. "A long time coming," said Tim. She'd been a classics professor forever, and winnowing down and weaning her doctoral students was the primary delay. Despite offers elsewhere, she chose a metropolitan university so they could continue to live in town. Tim was asked often to teach, but invariably declined. He and Lev shared a devotion to their work that made the trappings of their success distractions. It was the same with honors. He only won if his publisher entered. He would appear, speak briefly and gratefully, congratulate other winners, thank the judges, and leave as soon as possible. Pen also wrote. A burst of papyri deciphering almost derailed her retirement, but her university gave her a permanent research position, so she retired, took it up, and focused on this trove. Oddly, Tim was involved, owing to his visual memory. "BeFer than AI," one her colleagues said. Was it true? Tim asked. Life was less mechanical than ever, he observed. It was digital, the works embalmed and encased, or the materials were composites that needed arcane fabricating things. He observed a Mini some other car had sideswiped, reduced to rubble lying around what remained of it. His old Lancia was a relic, he thought, every time he worked on it. Pru's Emma found someone in Italy to scrounge parts, but it still took half a year to find a replacement oil pump. He could improvise, and did, but there were limits. Stephen's tractor was similar, an ancient Massey-Ferguson. August asked if the Lancia could be made electric. Yes, in theory, Tim said. He considered it, as internal combustion engines are like cigareFes now to climate activists. He'd do it if he had to. They had three girls and a boy, fiFed in by Pen around her academic career "in the manner of Elizabeth Ancombe."

Unlike the belle dame of WiFgenstein studies, Pen was gifted amply by her father, a great lover of children, having missed his own to some extent in his quest to make money. It was his calling, they all realized, and the FT occasionally made it clear he was very often the only one to skirt some debacle and the earliest to get in on and then get out what drew the herd next. Sometimes he sat it out altogether. He more or less took over Tim's extended family as an outsized figure of largesse, so the country house steadily improved, inside and out, and nearby places were acquired that seemed to subvert Lev's dislike of excess property, but it proved he was okay with it if someone else held title and made primary use of it, inviting him "anytime" to visit. As he got older, his preference for family outweighed going abroad unless Constance suggested it. He left that to her, but went on his own to the country to be with the children. Whenever Penelope imagined the ancient Greeks, her father came to mind, like those farmers who took up arms for Athens, a diversion from plowing, then went back to it. He regarded almost everything as a sport of some kind, but when he fished, for example, he ate what he caught. He regarded catch and release as cruel to the fish and stupid. Pen was close to August and Tem, and to Tatiana, her youngest sister. Tatiana's daughter, the lovely Natalia, named for Tat's favorite novelist and her Italian husband's mother, would soon marry at the parish church, an event making for the kind of festival that marked every season. While reading Michael Frayn's Among Friends, Tim said to Penelope that it was at the border of too late, just shy of it. Writing is a reflex, he added, like playing scales. A book is new every time, unless it isn't. "If it isn't, please tell me."

Tatiana is 63

Tatiana was a mystery to her siblings, but not to Lev. He felt she was like Constance had Constance's appetites been directed in a different direction. Tat, as they all called her, wrote on media in the broadest sense. She started with art and film, the followed the trail. Popular culture interested her most of all, and she proved to have a Tim-like knack for absorbing quantities of it and then drawing aFention to aspects, typically widely disparate, that related. This from Lev, he believed. He had his own thoughts about Tim. She almost never discussed her work, pointing out that "it's all there to read." This was true, she wrote constantly, much of it notes for more substantial things in progress. "I work out loud," she said. Tim in particular followed her assiduously. She was close to him and her brother, but August had no interest at all in media, catalogues excepted. Tim followed it like dialogue. He wrote screenplays for fun (he said) and worked things in borrowed from her posts, a secondhand relationship to the media itself, viewed only to give his mind a sense of its form or nature. Her own tactic was similar, "snapshots of the flood from my ark," rarely bothering to translate things, being mainly drawn to the action and the soundtrack. "Noise more than signal" was her view of the correct order to get an understanding. Lev totally agreed. "There are no signals, or hardly any," he told her in Tim's hearing. The three of them often talked, as it was in a way talking shop for them, given their minds. A shorthand went along with it, part of their mutual sympathy. It was, she thought, likely a sign they were on the spectrum, but luckily they were still emotive. Minds like these were a kind of higher species, yet wrapped up in their bodies, hers and Tim's one sort, Lev's another.

She was striking in her prime, with many suitors. She fell for her Italian, an architect like her brother. He had an office in Milan and another in Ticino. Brexit made a mess of things, but Lev foresaw it and Prudence took care of it. Ludo used her as his CEO and Emma as his back office, as his practice was also tiny and bespoke. Natalia and Giulia were dual citizens. Predictably, both hated social media. Tatiana saw this as the line one could draw through the two families. On one side, there was an abhorrence of the new as a betrayal. She thought this traced back to the early loss of a parent or parents. On the other side, there was a view of contemporary life as a creative source. Some fell on both sides, as Tim and Lev did. Tat was all-in for the new, but she brought the past consciously along, subscribed to Walter Benjamin's refusal to divide time. When a drought in Budapest revealed a submerged statue, Tat thought of him immediately. Still, she drew the line. In the company of those on the other side, she never talked shop, nor did they talk shop with her. She was admired, her daughters loved. Ludo and August shared the materiality and craft their work involved. Ludo loved Tim's old car, sometimes borrowing it and singing 1950s Italian pop songs as he drove, to his daughters' amusement. The two architects were from different planets, aesthetically, but spoke the secret language of that profession. It seemed odd to her that she wrote, given her subject maFer, especially in an era when AI threatened to take over, scaring the screenwriters into striking. Tim told her that writing was what humans do, will do. Machines will write like machines, just like some humans do, also. If it can be phoned in, beFer that a machine does it than us.

Natalia is 23, Ben is 26

Ben, training in the genetic end of medicine, met Natalia at a party near Modena. She'd gone there to see Paola, whose parents owned the farm where the party was held. Paola's mother Genia is a d'Este, the ducal family that ran the region back in the day. She and Paola were friends from a Swiss boarding school they aFended. Paola introduced Ben as her American cousin. Now that they were engaged, she knew his convoluted backstory: lesbian parents, the father actually one of the women's brother, Paola's father, so all half-siblings. Ben's mother is the wife. Same with his sister Jo, now living in Ferrara, married to another d'Este. Ben's father may be the son of Louis Kahn, the architect, but no one is sure and no one will do a DNA test. His greatgrandfather was a Mapuche from Argentina. "Let's do a DNA test," Natalia suggested. Ben resisted, but finally agreed. His showed that yes, Kahn figured, and his father, not some random donor, was his father. Her test showed, OMG!, that her grandfather wasn't Lev, it was Tim. Two kind old men, so different yet equal in their affections and surprisingly close given different careers entirely. And now here they both are, visiting the country house for their wedding, Ben's parents aFending along with Jo and her Federico, and Leo, a famous architect and entrepreneur who her father knew slightly. They put the DNA test aside and married across three successive days and nights. Ben made notes in an effort to sort out who was who. Jo and her baby won Natalia's heart, and her Federico made fast friends of Stephen and Jack, disappearing into the outback to talk agrarian shop. Catherine, ever thoughtful, invited the newlyweds to stay

on and use a coFage that appeared purpose-built for procreation. (Her mother vouched for it.) One by one or two by two, the throng departed. Curious about the sort of medicine Ben intended to practice, Tem invited him for a walk, so Natalia went down to the river to find her grandfather fishing. She'd learned to fish from him, and he had a spare rod with him (always), so they fished together, giving each other luck. When Lev felt they'd caught enough for dinner, he sat back on the bank and they caught up on her life outside recent events. He was, as usual, open, kind, and innately curious about her. It led her finally to tell him about the DNA test. He said he'd guessed her mother was Tim's, "unsurprising, as Constance was gone on him. I thought she'd drift off, but when she found she was pregnant, she thought it was mine. It led her to cool things off, then August introduced Tim to Pen and the rest is history, as they say. Now you've confirmed what Constance herself never imagined. Once I met Tim's sisters, I saw how your mother takes after them, but she favors Constance too, which masks it. Tim never knew, either, but he and Tatiana have always had affinity. When he married Pen, he just slid into our family, and we appropriated his, as you know, a very happy ending to a story that has your DNA test as a coda, just as it solves the mystery of Trent's father. Trent and his mother have wisely left that maFer to the gods, and I suggest you leave this maFer with them, also. Not every revelation should be acted on. It can seem like a signal, but it's likely noise."

Paola, 24, talks shop

Leo made sure that Ludo and August knew that her grandniece Paola was an architect like her and them. She set the scene for Paola by suggesting to the men that they should collaborate, noting how her own work invariably involved a context set by existing buildings or a local tradition. She also noted that the perennial challenge for practices like theirs is to test the limits of bespoke, to see if what they knew could find a larger audience, at least on occasion. They took this in. They'd known each other a long time, of course, being part of Lev's family, and Lev himself took an interest in their work, as he took an interest in everything that interested others who interested him. For her part, Constance, holder of Lev's philanthropic purse, was on the hunt for new causes. The air, she felt, was filled with them. Paola had finished at Berkeley in May. What appealed most to her was the shop—she liked tangibility. As she and Tim discussed his Lancia, he picked up on this, mentioning how the family's two architects appeared to have things in common with Paola's grandmother, despite the aesthetic differences in their work. "Apprentice with them," he said, pointing to the season he spent in Bordeaux, years before. Leo and Paola met with August and Ludo on one of the terraces Jack and Stephen had added to anchor seFings one might encounter, walking out to explore. A pergola shaded them as Leo made her argument. Then Constance drifted in to spirit Leo away. Paola, inheriting her grandmother's directness, made her proposal straightaway. They listened, aware of her provenance. She's very talented, Tim had said, a conclusion he'd arrived at as they bent over the Lancia's motor and he walked her through it. "She could repair it," he told himself, and enjoy the process.

Constance pressed Leo a liFle. "I tell Lev what to back. Lately, mothers and their babies and girls' schooling draw my aFention. I spoke with Bren and Jo about Modena. Bren told me that you designed the clinic there, which needs to be expanded. Jo said she'd like to teach in a convent school, but one she built from scratch on the model of the lycées in France that drew young French intellectuals as teachers. I gather that you and they are discussing these possibilities. My husband and I wondered if we could possibly help." Leo nodded. "There's one other project to consider, the focus of my granddaughter Jo's husband, Federico. He's a d'Este, like Genia, but another branch of that family. They tend the farmsteads that were theirs, but are now coops, and Federico is the negociant who keeps it all running. It's an ancestral calling, but he has an MBA and wants to see if the model can be replicated. He and Stephen are talking, but he needs a mentor who has a bigger picture." ""We spent a holiday once in that region," Constance said. "I'd love to go back. Let's talk with Lev. There's so much here to work with, which will please him. We're both so glad that Natalia's marriage has brought our families together. It's odd how that works, isn't it?" Leo nodded. "It's always how it works in my experience," she said. Leaving the men to work out the details, Paola went back to ﬁnd Tim with his ancient car. "I was thinking," he said, "that at some point we should get this back to Italy and you should take it over." She beamed. "I'd love that. Such a beauty, and you've taken such good care of it! I'll need those, of course," she added, gesturing at his tools. "Yes," Tim said. "When it's time, you shall have them."

Jo is 24, Nora is one

Lev liked babies instinctively, so he found himself with Jo and Nora, and sometimes with Nora alone to give Jo a bit of time to herself. Nora took to him, this mountain of a man who held her solidly yet carefully, as Jo observed. Lev had an instinct for adults too. He could ferret out their conflicting thoughts in conversation the way Tem could read Tim from long exposure. Thus, he knew soon that Jo was of two minds about some things and not in others. Not , for example, about Federico, his ambitions, the wisdom of their marriage, the arrival of Nora. But her roles in life, especially those thrusted on her, were an issue. Leo was a Prospero-like figure, he thought, reluctant to break her staff. She meant well and much of her power was used for good, but she had blind spots, as all people do. In Jo's case, what she missed was the nature of Jo's ambitions. Leo was a creator, brilliant at it. Jo was a receptor, helpless without the germ of an idea, but exceptional once planted. Leo had in a sense outrun her ambition, a territory Lev was familiar with. You see what you always saw, but time is against you, so you look to others, but how do you tell them? What do you tell them? He depended on Constance to help him with this, but Leo had no Constance. Bren came closest to it, because Bren was clear about her roles in life and Leo's clinic suited them. Lina was much less clear. "Tem is who you should consult," he told Jo. Tem was his favorite of that family's women, and her approach to life resembled Jo's, he thought. "I really mean that she's a model for you, but you should also talk with her. I should be clearer. Tem moves through life a day, a week, a month, a year at a time. Her plans are both specific and intuited, but she has moved mountains in her time.

Intrigued, Jo tracked Tem down and told her what Lev had said. "I'm honored," Tem began. "I make no claims at all, but on paper, yes, I've moved some mountains, starting with Jack, not the easiest man to aFract let alone marry, yet I did, and remade the household, rebuilt the family that life took away from me." She suddenly began to cry. "Oh, I'm so sorry," she said, "I never think about it, but it's always there and sometimes it surfaces." She paused a moment. "I should explain," she said. "My mother died having me, and then my father drowned himself in the river here when I was four. He never got over her, you see, and I blamed myself forever, but Tim rescued me, God bless him, so I was left only with missing my father, who I loved. It wasn't enough, that love, to save him, that was the quandary, and Tim said to me that really we are bystanders when it comes to the inner lives of others, and when they weigh their lives and decide to take them, we can never know the math." She put her hand on Nora's head. "I was saved by them. And Jack lost his father early, so we have that bond." She shook her head to clear it. "Since then, I lived a day at a time, but dared to look out a week, maybe a month or nine months. Life hands you such increments of time and they feel real or legitimate, time you can work with. My desires are quite simple, really: a house with children, a garden, a place in the country, a river where my father always is, mostly for beFer. When I'm here, I pray daily for his soul and he appears in my dreams. He could be calm with me and it gives us both pleasure when I'm here. It never happens in London, so he must be tied to this place."

Elizabeth is 90, Lina is 56

She was unwell when Natalia and Ben wedded, but word of it reached her, including the fact that Catherine and Stephen had asked members of Ben's family to stay on. It came from Tim, who helpfully wrote out who was who. When she read it, Elizabeth telephoned her brother to say that she intended to visit if they could ﬁnd a room for her. A room was found, she took the train, fetched by Tim and Paola at the station where they'd all arrived, one by one or two by two, before the wedding. When she was introduced to Paola by Tim, Elizabeth surprised her by speaking animatedly to her in Italian. As she explained, speaking over the Lancia's considerable interior noise, she was the translator of Caterina, the Ferrarese writer, part of both the visiting families and the great-grandmother of a guest, Federico. She was writing a biography of Caterina, so she knew a good deal about the family. She also knew, from the keeper of Caterina's archive, that Lina also took an interest and had met Caterina in person, as had Leo. Tim had spoken with Catherine to arrange for his oldest sister's visit, but hadn't bothered to tell others, not realizing the connections Elizabeth described. "We'll have to organize a dinner," he said to Paola. "Oh, Lina will be in heaven," she said. "Her dinners are legendary." With Paola as emissary, word quickly spread. Tim took it upon himself to ask Lina if she was up to cooking. First, he quizzed Catherine on the makings. "Lev has more than held up his end," she said. "We could feed the county." And Lina was willing, as Paola predicted. Unable to resist, she called on Elizabeth soon after she got the news, "hoping you're not too tired from the journey." She wasn't. Shaking oﬀ her malady energized her and other people always did.

Lina expressed regret, stupidity even, for not asking her about Caterina, but her quest was so specific, trying to work out her parentage. Then she remembered the note she found. "Oh, yes, I found it too," Elizabeth said, when Lina described it, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. My biography is literary—how she relates to Bassani, for example. I have a copy of the note, as it seemed important, but you know so much more about that whole thing. She certainly agonizes about sidestepping the racial law. We should write an article about it together. I'm also interested in the poetry of Luca Piranesi. I think it's wonderful. I want to translate her selection. I gather there are shelves of it, but she seems to have been one of his close readers." Lina almost shuddered with excitement, describing how she sat at Luca's desk in Piranesi's harbor, asking him to give her whatever it is writers require. "Moxie is how I think of it," Elizabeth said. "My father liked that word. I would very much like to see that archive for myself. We all write, as you may have heard, but translating from Italian has been my main occupation forever. Literary biographies are the accompaniment, to pay off the knowledge I acquire about these authors. Caterina is a personal favorite. That your daughter married her great-grandson is something, isn't it? Federico and his father are well-known in Ferrara as the tenders of the old domains of the d'Este, all those farmsteads that their ancestor Ercole managed to regain." Tipped off by Paola, Leo wandered in, and Elizabeth quizzed them both about their cousin. "Looking at those early photos in her archive, I felt she was striking, but as a child, I thought she was kindhearted but not easy to get to know." Elizabeth nodded. "One type of writer," she said.

Bren is 52, Trent is 60, GiulieJa is 27

GiulieFa was drawn to Tatiana, as was her mother. She felt her father belonged in a way to a different world, despite her immense respect for his and Gianni's work within it. It struck her that Tatiana's focus was identical with her own. The resistance that had dogged her since Leo recruited her lay here, she realized. Leo saw it too. Tatiana pushed back a liFle, as she had an affection for their work, yet she saw what GiulieFa meant. Leo made an analogy to architecture, how one is faced always with the question of adapting or supplanting. Tatiana said that media is like weather now. "I think we live with it as weather, aware of it, remembering our awareness, but also ignoring it, often by necessity." She asked Genia how her criticism addressed this. "I've given it up," Genia said. "Of course, there are things to write about, but it feels pointless to do so. This may be a function of my age. You get oversaturated, too laden with comparables." At the river, Bren ran into Trent, standing alone gazing at the water. "I should fish, maybe," he said. "Lina told Jo how she and Ben were sparked," Bren said. "There's a part of her I will never understand." Trent looked at her. "I will never forget it," he said finally. "She wanted Jo to know she was desired," Bren said. "Usually that's a truism, but desire is a subject in your family. You could open a school." Trent nodded. "We were also desired, Lina and me. Not everyone is, as you must see in your practice. In our case, desire was purposeful, beFer certainly than using a baster. We wanted those babies. Fecundity is a marvelous drug. Luckily, our addiction to it was contained, as Genia saw. Her thoughts were dynastic, though, breeding for perpetuation. It runs in her family and if you get in its orbit, as Jo did, you'll be pregnant in a fortnight."

Tatiana found them interesting, these two women. She liked Italians, and Genia came from deep stock, a family of kings, not just dukes. She saw this, even in the more exotic GiulieFa. She was good at reading lineage in women, and ancient noble families were magnets for diversity. Leo too was interesting, an entrepreneur like her father, able like him to see things others missed and ambitious to do more. It didn't surprise her that they hit it off. Her mother, one of whose roles in life was to put the next thing in front of Lev, give him that pat on the shoulder Camille Paglia spoke of. Leo and her family were a stroke of luck, new territory. She might follow along and see where it led. "Film," she said, "is important in the same way books are." It came out of the blue, but the others nodded. "I mean, books are ridiculous, and yet we write them and read them. Films, also. And like books, there are many terrible films, but a great film is like a great book. It does something to us, experiencing it. Trent and Gianni are masters of documentary film. Nothing they ever touched was less than wonderful. We have to honor that, even as we admit it's strange to find in our demented world, like noticing that the river actually has fish and isn't just another cesspool." She looked at Genia and GiulieFa. "Let's meet soon in Modena and sort this out. I also need a break. I too am oversaturated." Bren took Trent's hand and kissed it. "You're the only man I ever really loved," she said. "Sometimes I dream about that hut. I read the journal of Giulia, Lina's ancestor, writing about her MaFeo, and she says it only worked because they didn't marry, they just knew each other." "In season," Trent said, touching her shoulder.

In Season continues Time At Last, but adds the two families that appear in The Télos Trilogy. The ducal one is identiﬁed here as the d'Este, but please regard them as ﬁctional. John J. Parman is a writer and editor who lives in Berkeley. Time At Last is published by Snowden & Parman for The Pallas Gallery in San Francisco, its sole outlet.