Adrian Voss, Comfortable

The invitation came in September, on heavy stock, with the name of the institute and one word set in gold at the bottom: a dinner on the lawn, a string quartet, a short program, a request. Amos went because he always went, and he went expecting to see a sick man, because that is how such stories end in the moral arithmetic of lawyers: the respectable man embarrassed, the scandal arrived, the apology drafted.

What he found instead was a party.

Adrian Voss was fifty-six that year and looked forty, the way certain men do when they have spent twenty years being photographed. He went along the tables with his jacket open, remembering the names of people whose children he had met exactly once. When he came to Amos he sat down, without being invited, and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Amos. You look gray."

"I'm a lawyer. I'm supposed to."

"Are you eating?"

"I am being fed." Amos got the wine list out of the way. "I saw your boy."

If there was a pause, it was a pause in the weather. Voss turned the water glass a quarter-turn and let his eyes move out over the lawn, and when he spoke his voice had gone a half-step quieter, though his face had not changed at all.

"Dell is not a boy," he said. "Dell is a young man I have put my whole weight behind, and that is a sentence for your ears and nobody else's, and I would rather you did not repeat it."

"That's the whole of it?"

"That's the whole of it."

"Then why is he in your estate," Amos said, "and not your scholarship, and not the institute?"

Voss smiled at him. It was a real smile, or it had been made so many times that the difference had stopped mattering. "Because the scholarship will be administered by a committee," he said, "and the institute will be sold within eighteen months of my death to the highest bidder in Boston, and neither of those things will care what I wanted."

"That isn't an answer."

"And because I have one obligation in my life that is not public." He said it without moving his face. "It is mine, and I have paid for the right to keep it that way, and I have paid you to help me keep it." He stood up. "Come to the lab sometime. You've never come to the lab."

He was away before Amos could answer, doing the thing he did better than any man Amos had ever met: leaving a room in the middle of a sentence, so that the room stays his.

Two details from that night stayed with Amos, and he turned them over for months like stones in a pocket. The first was that Voss drank nothing at all, and pressed food on everybody else. The second was that when the quartet stopped at nine and the program began and the lights came up, Amos saw, at the edge of the tent, standing in the dark past the last table with his hands at his sides, a small young man in a dark coat, watching the table where Voss had been sitting — the napkin folded on the plate, the chair empty — with the expression of a tenant watching a landlord cross a yard. Nobody else saw him. When the program ended he was gone.

Amos went home, and he did not sleep, and at two in the morning he got up and made an actual list on actual paper, because that is what men of his kind do instead of thinking. On the list were three names. Beside the first, which was Voss's own, he wrote: grateful. Beside the second, which was Rusk's, he wrote: earned.

Beside the third name, Warren Pike's, he wrote nothing at all. Pike had been Voss's first partner. They had broken over something thirteen years earlier that nobody at the institute would explain, and Pike had not been photographed at a dinner since.