Interface Read Free

glass, along with a corny photo of the seventeen-year-old Cozzano, pigskin tucked under one arm, other arm held out like a jouster's lance to straight-arm an imaginary linebacker from Arcola or Rantoul.
    Diploma from Tuscola High.
    A photo of William with Christina, his high-school sweetheart, on the campus of the University of Illinois, where they had both attended college in the early sixties.
    A wedding picture, the couple flanked by eight roughed and false-eyelashed sorority belles on one side and seven tuxed and pomaded University of Illinois football players, plus a single Nigerian graduate student, on the other.
    Diploma (summa cum laude) with major in business and minor in Romantic languages.
    A battered and abraded football covered with thick stout signatures, marked ROSE BOWL.
    Two photos of Cozzano in the Marines, mounted side by side in the same frame: one, picture-perfect William in full-dress uniform, staring into the distance as though he can see a tunnel of light in the sky at one o'clock high, JFK in glory at the end of the tunnel, asking William what he can do for his country. The second picture, two years later: William Cozzano in a village in the Central Highlands, unshaven, eyes staring out alarmingly white and clean from a smoky face, a slack-jawed, inadvertent grin, a Browning automatic rifle dangling from one hand, a cherubic Vietnamese girl sitting in the crook of the other arm with her left leg wrapped in fresh white gauze, staring up at him with her tiny mouth open in astonishment; Cozzano was smiling through a crazy weariness that threatened to bring him to his knees at the next moment but the girl sensed that she was safe there.
    Another glass mount, but instead of cloth letters this one had forged medallions hanging on colorful satin ribbons: a purple heart and a bronze star from Cozzano's first tour and another purple heart and a silver star from his second, surrounded by a flock of lesser decorations.
    Baby pictures of Mary Catherine and James. An illuminated parchment from Pope John XXIII superfluously blessing their marriage.
    A picture of his father on a fishing trip in Alaska, shortly before his fatal heart attack.
    A photo of Cozzano in his Chicago Bears uniform, sitting on his helmet to keep up and out of a sideline morass, black grease on his cheekbones, blood hardening on his knuckles, grass stains on his shoulder pads.
    Pro Bowl rings from a couple of different years in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
    The last formal portrait of Christina, shot just before she had been transfigured by radiation and chemotherapy; this one also said "olan mills" and had been shot in a slightly nicer motel room in Champaign-Urbana by the same photographer who had done Cozzano's parents in 1948.
    A photo of William giving a victory speech on the front lawn of the family house in Tuscola, flanked by Mary Catherine and James. Autographed photo of William with George Bush at The Peking Gourmet Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, a harshly flash-lit amateur snapshot, Cozzano and Bush eating Peking duck in shirtsleeves and yukking it up.
    Cozzano jogging around Camp David with Bill and Hilary Clinton.
    An invitation to a White House dinner from the current President.
    The dome of the Illinois State capitol was built on foundations of solid stone seventeen feet thick. Cozzano needed to keep all of this stuff in his line of sight while he worked, because these pictures and souvenirs were his foundations.
    Cozzano was reading a letter that he was supposed to sign. He knew that he should simply do it, but his father had told him that he should always read things before he signed them. Since a large part of Cozzano's job involved signing things, this meant that he often worked late. He was holding his big pen in his left fist, nervously popping its cap on and off with the ball of his thumb.
    The intercom made a gentle popping noise as Marsha, his secretary, turned on her microphone in the next room. Cozzano