He sighed deeply and looked into the fire, and then back at her. “Because my mother is a very strong woman, Serena. She likes to have her way, and sometimes she thinks she knows what's best for us. But she doesn't always. If she could, she'd like to make our choices for us. I've never let her. My father always has. And she's made some damn good choices for him. But not for me, Serena, not for me.” He looked as though he were thinking back over his whole life as he spoke to her. “I thought that maybe if I called her first, she'd try to put her two cents in, want to fly over and meet you first, God knows what. She'd probably tell me I was robbing the cradle. Above all, I didn't want to get you upset. You've been through enough, and I want to make things easy for you, Serena, not harder. There was no point having her come over here to look you over, tell me you were terrific, and scare you to death in the bargain. So I thought we'd get our life all squared away by ourselves, and then tell her when it was a fait accompli.” He waited a moment and then, “Do you forgive me?”

“I suppose so.” He made sense, but the worry had not quite left her eyes. “But what if that makes her so angry, she dislikes me?”

“She couldn't, darling. How could she dislike you? She'd have to be crazy. And my mother is a lot of things, but not that.” And then, as though on cue, the phone rang, and it was the French operator, announcing to him that she had his transatlantic call for him. At the other end was a nasal-sounding operator in New York who was just about to get his call on the line. He heard the phone ring three times, and then it was answered by B.J.'s youngest brother. He accepted the call and roared into the phone over the static.

“How the hell are you, old boy? And Christ, how is Paris? I sure wish I were there!”

“Never mind that. How's school?”

“Same as ever. Dull as hell. But I'm almost out, thank God, and I got accepted at Stanford Med School for September.” He sounded like an excited schoolboy and B.J. grinned.

“That's terrific, kid. Hey, listen, is Mom around?” He seldom asked for his father. His father had been the invisible man for thirty years. In some ways their father had a lot in common with their middle brother. Mr. Fullerton was somewhat more enterprising than Greg, after all for one term he had been in the Senate, but he had coasted more on family prestige, good connections, and lots of campaign money than on any personal charisma of his own. In truth, it was Margaret Fullerton who should have been in politics. B.J. used to tease her that she should have been the first woman president. She would have too, if she could have got away with it. But she had settled for pushing her husband, being in the circles that such people as Eleanor Roosevelt were in.

“Yeah, she's here. You okay, Brad?”

“Just great. All of you? Greg? Dad?”

“Greg got his discharge a few weeks ago.” But it was no great shakes, as they all knew. He had served out the entire war at a desk in Fort Dix, New Jersey, spending weekends at home, or in Southampton in the summer. He had felt desperately guilty about it, as he had finally told his younger brother. But because B.J. had been so quick to get himself sent overseas and had several times had assignments in dangerous zones, their parents had been able to pull strings so that only one of their children was jeopardized. Greg had been safe in New Jersey at all times. And Teddy of course had been in college since 1941, with every intention of joining the army when he got out.

“What's he going to do now?”

“Why don't you ask him?” Teddy said with faint hesitation, and then, “Dad's going to take him into the law firm. What about you, Brad? Aren't you ever coming home?”

“Eventually. Nobody's said anything to me about it yet over here.”

“Are you ready to come home yet?” There was an odd questioning tone in Teddy's voice and Brad suddenly wondered what he knew.

“Maybe not. It's damn nice over here, Ted. Listen, if I'm still here next spring when you graduate, why don't you come out to see us—me …”he corrected quickly with a rapid glance at Serena across the desk.

“You think you'll still be there then?” Teddy sounded disappointed. “Hell, aren't you ever going to muster out, B.J.?”

There was a moment's pause. “I don't think so, Ted. I like the army. I never thought I would. But I think this is just right for me. And …”He looked at Serena with tenderness in his eyes. He wanted to tell Teddy about her, but he felt he ought to tell his mother first. “Listen, I'll talk to you later. Go get Mother, Ted. And listen,” B.J. said as an afterthought, “don't say anything to them, Ted. Mom's going to have a fit when I tell her I'm staying in the army.”

“Brad …” There was that strange tone in his voice again. “I think she knows.” It was as though he were warning his older brother of something.

“Anything wrong?” Brad was suddenly tense.

“No.” He'd find out soon enough. “I'll go get Mom.”

As it so happened, she was in the dining room having breakfast with Greg and Pattie Atherton, who had come for a special pre-Christmas breakfast “with them all. When Ted went to the doorway and beckoned his mother urgently, she came quickly, with a worried frown.”

“Is something wrong, Ted?”

“No, Mom, it's Brad on the phone. He called us to wish us a Merry Christmas.” And as he said it he hoped that his mother would allow it to remain merry. She took the phone from her youngest son, smoothing a hand over her snowy white hair, and sat down quickly in her desk chair. She was dressed elegantly in a black Dior suit that did extremely well by her still-streamlined youthful figure. She was a woman of fifty-eight, but she could easily have concealed ten or twelve of those years, had she chosen to, which she never did. She had B.J.'s same slate-gray eyes, and the features were much the same too, but whereas on B.J. everything looked easygoing and gentle, on his mother everything looked eternally tense. One always had the feeling that she was listening for something, some superhuman, extraterrestrial whine that was audible only to her. There was always about her a kind of electric tension, and she seemed ever about to pounce, which she did frequently, mostly on her husband, and often on her sons. She was a woman one spoke to carefully and handled with the utmost caution, so as not to set her off, or “get her started,” as her family called it. “Don't get your mother started, boys,” her husband had always implored his sons. And in order not to himself, he hardly ever spoke, but he nodded constant agreement. When they were younger, the boys used to imitate him a lot, B.J. having perfected his father's constant noncommittal, almost mechanical “Ummmmmm.…”

“Hi, Mom. How's everything in New York?”

“Interesting. Very interesting. Eleanor was here for lunch yesterday.” He knew she referred to Mrs. Roosevelt. “The political news these days is certainly ever changing. It's a hard time for her, for all of us really. There are a lot of readjustments going on after the war. But never mind all that, Brad darling. More to the point, how are you?” She said it with an emphasis that ten years before would have made him extremely nervous. But he had got over being intimidated by his mother when he gave up his job in Washington and moved to Pittsburgh to suit himself. It had been a move of which she had violently disapproved, and for the first time in his life he had decided that that wasn't going to change anything for him. “Are you all right, darling? Healthy? Happy? Coming home?”

“Yes to the first three, no to the fourth question, I'm afraid. At least they don't appear to be shipping me Stateside for the moment. But I'm fine, everything's just fine.” He saw Serena's expectant eyes upon him, and for the first time in a long time he realized that he was afraid of his mother. But this time he had to stand up to her, not only for himself, but for Serena. It gave him added courage as he plunged in. “I've got some good news for you.”

“Another promotion, Brad?” She sounded pleased. As much as she disliked having him in the army, as long as he insisted on being in it, his frequent promotions pacified her and pleased her with their prestige.

“Not exactly, Mom. Better than that in fact.” He swallowed hard, realizing suddenly what he had done. Serena was right. He should have called her first. Christ, imagine telling her like this when it was all over. He could feel a thin veil of sweat break out along his hairline and prayed that Serena wouldn't see. “I just got married.” He wanted to close his eyes and gulp air, but he couldn't, not with those expectant, trusting green eyes on him. Instead he smiled at Serena and gestured that everything was going fine.

“You what! You're joking of course.” There was a silence, but before that there had been a tight edge in her voice. He could imagine the tenseness in her face by listening to the tone of her voice. He could picture the elegant almost bony hand with the heavy diamond rings clutching the phone. “What's this all about?”

“It's about a wonderful young lady whom I met in Rome. We were married this morning, Mother, in the English church here.”

There was an endless pause while he waited. At her end her face was suddenly grim, her eyes the color of the Atlantic before a hurricane. “Is there some adequate reason why you've kept this a secret, Brad?”

“No. I just wanted it to be a surprise.”

His mother's voice was glacial. “I assume she's pregnant.”

Slowly Brad was beginning to burn. Nothing ever changed. No matter how old they got, she still treated them the same way. Like naughty, demented little puppets. It was what had driven him away years before. He always kind of forgot that part of it and he was realizing that things were no different now.