Said T. E. Lawrence picking up his Fork

The summer Noah turned fourteen, his mother left his father for a Caltech chemist with horn-rimmed glasses, a baritone warble, and the droopy countenance of a squid. That same summer, his father canceled their subscription to Scientific American, doused the magazines with lighter fluid, and started a bonfire on their newly constructed patio. It wasn't long before sirens wailed up the hill to the house and the neighbors came out in the middle of dinner with napkins still hanging from their collars, and everyone watched as his dad argued drunkenly with the firemen, who blasted the patio until nothing was left but a mound of black jelly and a cloud that hovered overhead like a UFO.

It was also the summer Noah's grandmother took him to see the Folies-Bergère.

Amma arrived on a Sunday afternoon in July, just as the divorce was heating up. His father was out—probably down at his office on Wilshire, drinking behind a pebbled glass door and watching the fog roll in above the tar pits. At the house it was just Noah and the housekeeper, Hattie, eating liverwurst sandwiches and listening to news of Adlai Stevenson's death on the radio. In the other room, the washing machine rattled and thumped, soaking specks of blood from Noah's T-shirt. Tweezers boiled in a saucepan. Hattie set a bottle of iodine by his glass of milk, then went about ironing her snood.

That morning Noah had tried to shoot a padlock off a door with his rifle. It was the old door to the backyard, taken away the month before when they poured the new patio and installed sliding glass. It now sat propped behind the garage, sentenced to firewood. Bored, impulsive, curious, alone, Noah decided to blow the rusted lock right off, western-movie style. He pushed the muzzle up against the logo, yale (where, incidentally, the chemist had sung with the Whiffenpoofs as a young man in a celluloid collar), and pulled the trigger. But the bullet's lead was soft—it splintered instantly, spraying back into his arms and neck and face. The lock remained stubbornly in place.

Now it hurt to chew his sandwich, the skin stretching over the bullet beads in his cheek. When he saw Amma's bone-colored Cadillac bump up over the curb and into the driveway, slicing a corner of the lawn, he knew that his grandmother—who always called his forehead aristocratic, his complexion mother-of-pearl—would mourn his ruined beauty with ardent and opinionated grief. Here he was, scarred, just before their big trip—first to Las Vegas, where one of her friends worked as a choreographer, then on to Schaumburg, Illinois, where he would stay for the summer with his aunt and uncle and his three cousins with names like hearty globs of oatmeal: Gretchen, Walter, Judd.

As a boy, Noah had loved Amma. Amma—who was always invited to give speeches at women's committees and DAR events, who believed in the edifying virtues of elocution lessons and good penmanship, who always smelled like peanut butter and ginger tea, which she claimed were salutary for the esophagus. A great beauty, she'd been an actress in her youth. Her home was the stage, she always told him, not the various hotels she stayed in around the city, with their marshy courtyards and ailing dumbwaiters (one of which Noah had climbed into as a boy, only to find himself lowered down to the kitchen, where he was discovered by a pair of frightened cooks with hairnets and tattoos). He was told to picture Amma in grand, smoky baroque theaters, where she always had the starring roles (except for that one dreadful film, a silent one—"mercifully lost; flung into the Pacific Ocean, no doubt!"—which she'd only done to pay her husband's gambling debts). Amma, with her Victorian posture that some people mistook for arrogance, her wicked laugh full of gold-crowned teeth, her conspiratorial whispers at the kids' table, where she always sat, by request, on family holidays. But...