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the table, hid his irritation under a layer of obsequy. Nor would Felicia’s brother let himself be outfawned, and the dinner became a kind of gladiatorial tournament of insincerity unfolding right in front of Daddy, who beamed all the while, as if he were seated at some other table, in some private, pleasant dream.
    Soon Daddy had decided, independently, he said, that William’s gifts would be better served by boarding school. You see? said William, long-distance from Vermont, and then he unveiled a private nickname. The Ghouls play hardball. She told herself this was just his persecution complex, but it was true that Amory and Felicia were around more often with William gone. And when Daddy finally proposed to her, Felicia began plotting to move the entire clan to this castle on the Upper West Side.
    Or maybe it wasn’t a castle, it was hard to say. It perched atop a tall brick building, invisible from the street, so that you only ever saw it from within—like one’s own head, it occurred to Regan, standing before it on New Year’s Eve. There was no apartment number, and the word “penthouse,” thanks to Bob Guccione, would have been beneath the dignity of the family name, which Felicia had of course taken as her own. You said you were “here for the Hamilton-Sweeneys.” Those last five syllables had never felt more alien than they did now in Regan’s mouth. The concierge and a coworker were watching a small television behind their desk. Regan couldn’t imagine Felicia approving, but before the concierge’s eyes could detach from the screen, she felt guilty for her condescension. What was his name? Manuel? Miguel? “For the gala,” she added.
    The way he looked at her made her conscious of parts of her body she’d been ignoring, the bare clavicle under her coat, the sad décolletage she’d tried to hide with a butterfly pin, the wisp of fugitive up-do tickling her neck. She must look like a high-schooler tarted up for prom. And why should Miguel recognize her? She avoided this place as much as possible. Only recently, with Daddy’s memory crumbling, had she started coming over to get his Hancock on various bits of company business. And besides, she wasn’t the same person she’d been a month ago; she was single. “I’m Regan. The daughter.”
    “Jes. Ms. Regan.” He glanced down at his list, as though to double-check she wasn’t part of some terrorist cell seeking to infiltrate the apartment. “I take you right up.”
    The elevator was the old-fashioned kind, with a folding gate and an uncomfortably floaty feeling. Though there was a stool next to the levers, Miguel remained standing. Regan couldn’t think of anything to say. Then the gate peeled back to reveal a high-ceilinged entry hall, empty except for the great blue Mark Rothko painting on the wall and, flanking it, two tall, what would you have called them … ? Braziers, she supposed, each crowned with a gas-fed flame.
    Little about Felicia’s New Year’s gala had changed in a decade. It was like that game, red light/green light. You turned away for a year, life went on, but when you turned back, everything looked just as you’d left it. The same four hundred people, the same conversation, the same drunken laughter at the same stale jokes. The only difference would be the theme. A theme imposed a degree of discipline on the otherwise unruly social body, Felicia believed. The previous year (God, had so little time really passed?), it had been “Hawaiian Night,” meaning that in place of whatever usually topped the end tables had sat vases of birds of paradise and pineapples viscid with glitter-glue. Garlands of real orchids, airlifted from the Pacific, wove precisely through the newels of the staircases. Felicia’s grass skirt had nearly swallowed her wee frame. The year before had been something Iberian; Regan could recall only yards of raw velvet and toreador pants. And what did these braziers signify? Let There Be Light? Let Me Stand