Chapter One

Abraham's Voice

My name is Abraham Isaac Lee, and I am my father's son. This is a story about Land and Love and a Great Fire that consumed all my father's dreams. If my voice sounds too ... too artificial, then I am happy. I sound like my father, my wife tells me. Even my sister, who has escaped her parents, who lives in the West, even she tells me that I am her father's son. At this moment I am wearing his clothes: a sweater seldom worn by him when it was new, a pale blue tie given to him by my mother, his brown penny loafers. I am in his image. My southern accent is subtle. My hair is parted as his was, but black, not red. Combed as close as possible to being like his on his wedding day. My speech is usually dramatic, my gestures are precise. Grace, my wife, tells me that I have been this way since even before my mother died. Grace, my precious and essential wife, whose name my father loves because he believes all names have power. My father, who believes every material object is a symbol that requires interpretation. My father named me; my mother named my sister. I am Abraham, and I am Isaac. Because of my father, I have never liked irony.

    My father, my mother, Grace and her father, my sister, a short black man named Pete, a dog named Frank, a pilot named Harry, a girl named Polly, and a few others. All of them have a role to play.

    And Alice, whose voice I hear even now, twenty-five years later, whose sad and smirky voice tells me that I must forgive myself. I always remember Alice when I go to Mass with Grace and my children. I was raised Catholic, as