He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.

It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.