She put down the plate. "You were in radio."
"Long ago," he said. "Before you were born, nearly. And for a little while after." He smiled without looking up. "I kept people company. Mostly at night."
At eight-thirty they sat in the living room in front of the Magnavox, Roman on the floor in his flannel pajamas with the rocket ships on them, Harper at one end of the sofa with her stocking feet tucked under her, and Lucian at the other end in a pair of Harper's father's old wool socks, which she had found at the bottom of a drawer and could not remember why she had kept. The tree lights made colored shadows on the ceiling. Snow ticked at the window. On the screen Charlie Brown stood beside his sad little tree and asked whether anybody knew what Christmas was all about, and Linus walked out into the spotlight with his blanket and told him.
Roman fell asleep before the news, curled on the rug with his head on a throw pillow that said GREETINGS FROM NIAGARA FALLS, and Harper didn't move him. She turned the sound down on the television until the anchorman on Channel 7 was just a moving mouth in front of a map of Western New York covered in white, twenty-two inches at the airport, more coming, the Thruway closed from Silver Creek to the Pennsylvania line. She got up and got the bottle of Christian Brothers brandy from above the refrigerator, which had been there since Easter, and poured two small glasses, and gave one to Lucian, who held it in both hands and didn't drink it.
"You asked me," she said, sitting back down, "if I was certain."
"I did. It was a strange thing to ask. I apologize."
"No. It wasn't strange. Nobody's ever asked me that before, and they should have, because it's the right question." She drank some of the brandy. It burned and then it didn't. "I wasn't born Harper. I was born Agnieszka. Agnieszka Mazur. My father still calls me Aggie. When he calls me anything."
He said nothing. He was very good, she noticed, at saying nothing. It wasn't the empty kind of nothing. It was the kind that left a door open.
"My mother died when I was eight," she said. "In 1960. In the spring. It was her heart, something with a valve, they could probably fix it now. My father worked at Bethlehem. The Lackawanna plant, the open hearth. After she died he took nights because the money was better and because, I think, he couldn't stand to be in the house when it was dark. So he'd leave at ten-thirty and come home at seven in the morning, and in between it was me. My aunt was supposed to look in, but she had six of her own on Fillmore Avenue and she didn't look in much." Harper turned the glass. "I was a scared kid. The house made noises. We lived on Hertel then, in the back half of a double, and the trains went by on the Belt Line and shook the dishes. So I'd take the radio from the kitchen into bed with me. A little Philco. It was green. And I'd turn the dial until I found somebody talking."
"And you found somebody."
"I found this program." She smiled; she couldn't help it; she never could, when she thought about it. "It was on a little station, I don't think it even exists anymore. WNIA. Twelve-seventy. It came on at eleven and went till two. It was called The Harbor Light. There was a man who did it, he played old music, Glenn Miller, Jo Stafford, the Ink Spots, stuff that was old even then. But mostly he read messages. To the boats."