"I will," Cal said.
The house was at the end of a long drive through bare trees, big and gray and stone, with a slate roof and too many chimneys to count. Inside, it was dark. Every curtain in every window was drawn. It smelled like furniture polish and old roses and a little like dust. Mrs. Petrakis, who was short and round and wore a black dress and a cardigan, met them in the front hall and took Cal's face in both her hands like she'd known him all her life and said something in Greek that sounded like a blessing, and then led him into a library with books to the ceiling and two leather armchairs by a cold fireplace, where Mr. Calloway was sitting in a gray tweed jacket with the newspapers stacked on a table at his elbow.
"Calloway," he said. "Good. Sit. Let's see what you've got."
Cal read the front page. He stumbled on Gorbachev and Nicaraguan, and he read too fast, and his voice cracked twice. Mr. Calloway stopped him every few paragraphs. "Slower. You're not trying to get it over with. Pretend you're telling me something you think I'd want to know." And later: "Don't read the headlines like they're shouting. They're only headlines." And once, when Cal mispronounced recalcitrant so badly they both had to stop, "Spell it." Cal spelled it. "Recalcitrant," Mr. Calloway said. "Stubborn. Refusing to cooperate. A senator is recalcitrant. A mule is recalcitrant. I am, according to my doctors, recalcitrant. Go on."
At ten-thirty Cal stopped reading and looked around the dim room.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You can ask."
"Why are all the curtains closed?"
Mr. Calloway was silent a second. "What would I need them open for?"
"I can't see the paper very good."
There was a pause long enough that Cal thought he'd said something terrible. Then the old man made a sound that was almost a laugh. "No," he said. "No, I suppose you can't. Go ahead, then. Open them."
Cal got up and pulled the cord on the big window behind the chairs, and the heavy green velvet slid back, and light came in—thin November light, but light, falling across the rug and the leather chairs and the old man's hands on the armrests. Dust hung in it, turning. Out the window there was a long lawn going down to a line of bare oaks and, beyond them, far below, the Ohio River, gray and wide, with a coal barge on it.
Mr. Calloway turned his face toward the window. He couldn't see the light. Cal knew that. But he turned toward it anyway, the way a plant does, and he sat like that for a while with his eyes closed.