Y MOTHER felt the chill, and she gave a little shudder, and she linked one arm with Bert’s and the other with Buster’s and drew the boys closer to her.
    “What do you suppose it means?” she asked.  She shuddered again.
    “Means?” asked my father.
    “Yes,” said my mother.  “I mean, it must mean something, don’t you think?”
    “Why?” asked my father.
    “I don’t know why, exactly,” said my mother.  “Maybe I’m just being silly, but doesn’t it seem a little weird to you—the way we were all drawn here by it?”
    “Huh?” said my father.
    “I see what you mean,” said Buster.
    “You do?” said my father.
    “I think so,” said Buster.
    “Well, let me in on it, will you?” said my father, meaning to be funny.  “I’m completely in the dark.”
    “It’s just,” said Buster, “it’s just, the way it interrupted everything, the way one minute we were going about our business, doing whatever we were doing, and the next minute we noticed the fire in the sky, or maybe we heard the sirens, and from then on the fire took over.  It took us over.  You see what I mean?”
    “Um, yeah,” said my father, and here he may have blushed, because it wouldn’t have been at all unlikely, I think, that at the time when he had heard the siren, he had been rummaging through his brother’s dresser drawers searching for notes from my mother or snapshots of her.
    (Buster would almost certainly have had snapshots of her, since he was an amateur photographer with a darkroom in the basement.  So my father would probably have been looking at Buster’s snapshots of my mother when the sirens sounded.  At the time, my mother was equally enamored of both of the Leroy boys and couldn’t decide which one her heart favored, and if my father had been searching through Buster’s things, then he would have reacted with a start when he heard the sirens and would have tried quickly to arrange the notes and snapshots as he’d found them.  Buster’s mentioning the sirens would have reminded my father of all that and brought to his mind the likelihood that later that evening, when they returned home after the fire had burned out or had been extinguished by the Babbington Volunteer Hose Company, Buster would notice that his mementoes of my mother had been disturbed.  Later, after Buster was killed in the war, my father inherited Buster’s snapshots of my mother, and the portraits and figure studies he had made of May Castle, a friend of my grandparents’, and his photographic gear.)
    “That’s right!” said my mother.  “I’ll bet that all of us here, for the rest of our lives, will remember what we were doing when we heard the sirens or saw the glow.  And of course we’ll always remember this night.”
    She looked at Buster with dreamy eyes, eyes aglow with more than the flames from the Nevsky mansion, and thought to herself that it was most certainly true, that she certainly would remember this night.  She gave Buster’s arm a little squeeze, drew him a little closer to her.
    “So, it seems as if it must mean something,” said Buster.  “As if it ought to mean something—especially to us, the people it brought together here.”
    “Wow!  Too deep for me,” said my father, with the dismissive wave that I would come to know well by the time I reached his age—that is, the age he was on the night the Nevsky mansion burned.
    My mother drew Buster a little closer still, and he returned her squeeze.
    “I couldn’t help overhearing,” said a voice from behind them.
    It was Mr. Locke, the principal of the high school.  Joining the group, he moved in behind them, tossed his arms in a comradely way across the shoulders of the Leroy boys, and embraced the entire trio, pressing himself, at the height of the embrace, up against my mother’s teenage bottom.  My mother turned to give him what she meant to be a withering look, and in turning she noticed her parents, my grandparents, Gumma and Guppa, standing a bit apart from the crowd, watching the fire with everyone else, but wearing the queerest smiles, as if something in the fire brought them pleasure.  Those queer smiles puzzled my mother, for they raised the heretofore unthinkable possibility that the fire might bring someone something like pleasure, and that possibility seemed to say something about how individual our responses to events are, even to events that seem to have such universal significance.  That thought made my mother realize that she, too, had been taking a kind of pleasure from the fire, that it seemed somehow to have shown her how much she loved Buster.  She wanted to draw the attention of Bert and Buster, and even Mr. Locke, to the queer smiles her parents were wearing and find out what they made of them.  She decided to speak, to wonder aloud whether her parents’ queer smiles might not contradict everything she and Buster had just suggested about the fire and the universality of its effect on its audience.
    “Gee,” she began, but her attention was diverted from her own thoughts when Mr. Locke stopped squeezing the shoulders of the Leroy boys and turned his attentions to her shoulders instead.  While kneading her, he continued his own remarks, thus:
    “If I may paraphrase what you’ve been saying, the fire is such a spectacular event that it seems as if it ought to be more than merely what it apparently is—a big fire.  It seems as if it ought to be a sign of something, something that, to judge from the compelling brilliance of its sign, must be particularly significant for those it has drawn to it, attractive nuisance that it is.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Buster.
     “We have the feeling, don’t we, that the fire, this sign, and this moment when it has appeared to us, must mark the end of something—or—and here we think of the Phoenix, don’t we?—the beginning of something.  Some of those gathered here, I’m sure, will find that it marks the end of childhood and the beginning of manhood—or”—and here he kneaded my mother with increased vigor—“womanhood.  Others will discover, because popular songs have taught them to look for this particular discovery in nearly every significant moment, that it marks either the first spark of love or its last dying embers.”
    My mother blushed, but in the rosy glow of the fire, it’s unlikely that anyone noticed.
    “And in the years to come,” Mr. Locke went on, “I fear that this night, this fire, this moment, may seem like even more of a portent.”
    “How so, sir?” asked my father.  He jabbed my mother in the ribs and winked when she looked at him.
    “When the sound of sirens has come to inspire in us a terror that we haven’t had to confront before,” said Mr. Locke, “we are all going to remember this fire and we are going to be mightily tempted to see it as a sign of something—especially as the end of something, as the end of our halcyon days.  Perhaps I ought to say the end of your halcyon days.  Mine—well, that’s beside the point.  Then, I think, when everything seems to have come apart, when everything seems to have gone up in smoke, you may see this fire blaze again—in recollection, that is—and say to yourself, ‘My world was on fire that night, and the innocence of my youth went up in the flames.’”
    “What’s he talking about?” my father asked in a murmur.
    “The war?” suggested my mother.
    “Yeah,” said Buster, with clenched jaw.
    “But does it?” asked Mr. Locke.
    “Jeez, he’s unstoppable,” muttered my father.
    “Does it what?” asked my mother, who had gotten a little lost.
    “Does it mean any of those things?” Mr. Locke asked.  “Does it mean anything?”
    My mother, my father, and Buster stared at the burning building.  The flames illuminated their young faces.  My mother seemed entranced.  She wore a blissful smile.  She was quite certain that the fire would always mean something to her, that as the years passed she would look back at the night the Nevsky mansion burned as the night she chose Buster. 
    Buster’s jaw was still set, and in the fire he saw its horrible meaning: the inevitable coming of the war. 
    My father blinked into the light, annoyed with himself for not seeing in it a sign of anything.  Does it mean anything? he wondered.
    “No,” said Mr. Locke, answering his own question.  “It means nothing, nothing at all.  The cosmos doesn’t work that way.  It sends us no signs.  It has no meaning.  It sweeps along, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
    My mother knit her brows and held Buster tighter still.  Buster frowned into the light of the fire, but he returned my mother’s squeeze with a kind of grim protectiveness that worried her.  My father smiled.
    “I know where that’s from,” said my father.
    “Good for you, Buster,” said Mr. Locke.
    “Bert,” said my father.
    “Of course,” said Mr. Locke, with a chuckle.  He seemed to think that my father was mistaken but should be humored.  “The meanings we find in events are ours alone.  The meanings follow after the events, the laggard stepchildren of the facts.  Our reason struggles to keep up, to make sense of it all, but we don’t make sense of it all, we manage only a patchwork of attempts to make sense of it, because we’re trying to make sense of things for which sense is a completely irrelevant notion.”
    He gave my mother’s shoulders a final squeeze, pressed himself once again against her bottom, and walked off into the chilly darkness outside the rosy ring of the fire.
    “Thanks a lot, Mr. Locke,” muttered Buster.  “Next time, keep your ideas to yourself.”
    “Keep your hands to yourself,” said my father.
    “And that’s not all,” said my mother.

Kraft is a master of dialogue and description.

At Home with the Glynns is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin’s Press, at $11.00.

You should be able to find At Home with the Glynnsat your local bookstore, but you can also order it by phone from:

Bookbound at 1-800-959-7323 
Book Call at 1-800-255-2665 (worldwide 1-203-966-5470)

At Home with the Glynns is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. 

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.