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seat of the Chrysler and offered his hand to Lowell as he bent to enter the car.
    â€œI didn’t expect this,” Lowell said. “Thank you, Andre.”
    â€œWe had to take your mother to Hartford,” Pretier said.
    Oh, shit, that’s all I need, Lowell thought.
    Hartford was the euphemism for the Institute of Living, a private psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut.
    Pretier handed Lowell a small crystal bowl, a brandy snifter without a stem.
    â€œBad?” Lowell asked.
    Pretier threw up his hands in resignation.
    â€œShe simply can’t take strain, or excitement,” Pretier said.
    â€œWhat was I supposed to do, Andre?” Lowell asked, sharply. “Tell my father-in-law to stay in Siberia?”
    â€œI don’t think that had anything to do with it,” Pretier replied, not taking offense at Lowell’s outburst. Lowell had often thought that the real reason he disliked his mother’s husband was that Andre Pretier rarely, almost never, took offense at anything, no matter what the provocation.
    â€œWhat set her off, then?”
    Pretier threw his hands up in frustration again.
    â€œI don’t really know. She…uh…had a relapse in the city.”
    â€œA spectacular relapse?”
    â€œI’m afraid so,” Pretier said. “They had her at Bellevue.”
    â€œShe’s all right, now?” Lowell asked.
    Pretier nodded. “I thought you had enough on your hands,” he said. “Otherwise I would have called.”
    â€œShe didn’t start asking for me?” Lowell asked.
    â€œShe was sedated rather heavily until today,” Pretier said.
    â€œMedically, or because I was due in?”
    â€œBoth.”
    â€œAnd you think I should go to Hartford?”
    â€œI would be very grateful if you would,” Pretier said. “The doctors think it would be beneficial, if you could find the time.”
    How the fuck can I refuse, when you put it that way? Lowell thought. What decent, true-blue American boy could refuse to go see his loony mother in the funny farm when that would both be beneficial, according to the doctors, and make her long-suffering husband very grateful?
    â€œOf course,” Lowell said. “When?”
    â€œI didn’t think you would want to take the train,” Pretier said. “I’ve arranged for a plane.”
    â€œThat’s very kind of you, Andre,” Lowell said. He reached up and helped himself to more cognac.
    Â 
    His mother, a tall, rather thin, silver-haired woman, didn’t seem especially pleased that he had flown to Hartford to visit her, and she didn’t ask more than perfunctory questions about what had taken place in Germany and France.
    â€œYou said he was a count, didn’t you?” she asked. “Didn’t I hear that someplace?”
    â€œYes, he is.”
    â€œAnd lost everything in the war, doubtless, so that we’ll have to support him?”
    â€œActually no, Mother,” he said. “The von Greiffenbergs are from Hesse, which is in the American Zone. He didn’t have his property confiscated.”
    â€œWe’ll see,” she said, closing the subject. She didn’t like being told that the father of the foreign doxy her son had dragged home from Europe wasn’t after her money as well as his.
    A little ashamed of himself (she was, after all, a sick woman in a hospital), he refused to drop the subject.
    â€œActually, Mother, the reason I’m here is that he gave me a power of attorney to claim his property here.”
    â€œWhat property here?”
    â€œThe government has it, under the Enemy Alien Property Act. Some money, some securities, even some art.”
    â€œAnd you really think the government will give it up?”
    â€œSo the lawyers tell me.”
    â€œWe’ll see,” she said.
    Â 
    It was after ten when he finally got to his house on Washington Mews, a private alley near Washington