It is exactly 6 p.m.
       The Ambassador and his second wife, whom I immediately see is a Duchess of the English tea-rose variety, greet us cordially at the front-door entrance. The Captain's father is dressed to the nines in a three-piece autumn weight black wool suit. A white silk hankie is smartly tucked into the lapel pocket of his French-tailored double-breasted jacket. The Ambassador, almost ninety, still cuts a tall, handsome figure. Although the Captain is wearing suitcase-creased khaki pants, a just-ironed blue-striped shirt, worn boat shoes, and is hiding behind a film director's beard that needs a trim, I can see where he gets his looks.
       At the gate of the stairwell, the Duchess smiles evenly and waits until her husband says,
       "Well, shall we go in?"
       A strident woman clearly to the English manor born, the Dutchess floats regally over the threshold, barely rustling the hem of her Queen Elizabeth-style pastel floral-print dress and white low-heeled pumps. Her legs are long, her bone structure elegant, her hair coiffed into a halo of brown and gray around her faintly lined, gently powdered English complexion. If I didn't know she is in her late sixties, I could see her still lobbing tennis balls over the net and winning.
       "Oh, it's quite lovely here," I compliment, noticing the pewter vases in the entrance hall filled with soft peaches and cream roses carefully camouflaging the tropical brilliance of the French Riviera. "Like an English garden."
       "You Americans do tend to enjoy the color black," she remarks with a short glance at my dress.
       The Captain is holding a matching smile on his face and stands poised to escort the Duchess into the spacious, yellow-tinted drawing room carpeted with a plush pale blue-and-ivory silk Chinese Oriental. Raw yellow Chinese silk fabric dresses the walls, bathing the room in a buttercup glow. A spotlight focuses on a group of dark Dutch Master oils hanging in heavy gilt frames.
       There isn't a primary color in the entire place.
       Before he settles into his silk-striped soie de Lyon upholstered armchair, the Ambassador offers me a tour of the penthouse. The Captain's eyebrows lift and signal me to proceed, but with caution.
       The Ambassador personally escorts me through another parquet-floored hallway, brushing past pale champagne-colored tea roses sitting in a polished silver urn. He shows me the medieval Cluny tapestry draped behind a study door, a present from the Captain's late mother. He points out a set of ancient Ming-dynasty scrolls bequeathed to the Duchess by her wealthy late second husband, who I am also told leaves her a jade palace in China before the country turns red. He winds me through bisqued rooms of soft caramels perfumed with the scent of long-stemmed antique-white dinner roses.
       His fingers trace over Louis XVI marquetry, Duncan Phyfe tables, English silver trays, a weighty eighteenth-century family Bible opened to show the lineage of his ancestors. I take a peek at the decades of marriage entries and am surprised to see the Ambassador's mother and I share the same first name. Only I'm not recorded.
       The Ambassador tours me on through his personal study. Above a delicate mahogany French escritoire inset with a deep purple glass inkwell and one marble green-colored fountain pen, the Captain's father directs me to a bookshelf neatly lined with black leather-bound diaries faithfully recording in exacting fountain-pen script, the historical moments of his century-spanning diplomatic life.
       I can see the Captain's problem with his childhood - why Oriental carpets, heavy furniture, and weighty titles make him anxious. But I like the old man anyway, even if he was his country's diplomatic representative to Hitler's Berlin in 1933. I think he must have a lot of stories to tell. I am itching to read the journals.
       The old Ambassador sighs. His thick-veined hands pull out a leather diary and flip the pages.
       "It's all in here," he says.
       I am interested.
       "Did you ever make any world-altering decisions you regret?" I pry despite the Captain's warning not to ask too many questions.
       "Yes," the Captain's father answers, catching me by surprise.
       And he tells me a secret.
       He tells me he is one of the seven members of the United Nations committee appointed to divide Palestine into two separate states in 1947.
       I am very interested.
       He tells me how he sits in a small, overheated, windowless room in Flushing Meadow, New York, before the UN building is even an architectural plan, charged with drawing a line down the map of Palestine, cutting through towns and cities and mountains, dividing Jews from Arabs.
       "We didn't even have a proper map," he confides. "No one on the committee had ever been to Palestine. We had seven days to carve out a state."
       He tells me there is a map of the Holy Land printed on the last page of his family Bible - a Bible printed one hundred years earlier in 1848, marking the places of Jesus, the holy sites, the cities of the Old and New Testaments. The same Bible that now sits on his Louis XVI escritoire.
       He tells me how he locks the door on the committee in Flushing Meadow and instructs them to sit still until he returns. How his driver races him into the city where he unearths the family Bible from packed cartons of books in his hotel room. How he copies the map, enlarges it to a working size, then mounts it on the wall of the secret meeting room, where the six committee members are still waiting with their pencils, erasers, and scissors.
       They draw lines. They cut up the map. They circle biblical cities. They crisscross through mountains and deserts. They divide neighbors from neighborhoods, cousins from grandparents, villagers from villages, farmers from fields. Fridays from mosques, Saturdays from synagogues. They have no idea what they are doing, or that what they do will never be undone without bloodshed.
       "Imagine dividing Palestine in 1948 with a map from the Bible. For this, I am sorry." He shakes his head. "Not that it would have made any difference."
       His revelation stuns me.
       I think of my own family caught by the machine guns of Hitler's Germany. Their march from death camps in Poland to refugee ships in Italy. Jumping into the breaking surf to reach the coast of Haifa only to be swept up by waves of British patrols and sent to detention camps on Cyprus.
       And here I stand facing the Captain's father, as righteous as Michelangelo's frescoed God in the Sistine Chapel, pointing the very finger of life that creates the State of Israel.
       It is a complicated history.
       And only one half of the story.
       I think of my Jordanian friends, Palestinian exiles, their olive groves bearing fruit on the wrong side of the border. The humiliating shakedowns at checkpoints. The second-class citizenship. The seething resentment. Exacting inexact revenge.
       I want to tell the Ambassador it does make a difference.
       But the Duchess announces it is time for refreshments.
       Opening sliding-glass doors, the Ambassador steps me outside onto a sweeping wraparound balcony ten floors higher than the ground the elegant Belle Þpoque building is rooted on. The change of climate clears the topic of conversation.
       It is a beautiful balcony, only the grand view to the French blue sea is shuttered by a guardrail of towering Mediterranean Cedars of Lebanon planted side by side in terra-cotta floor pots. Like military guards standing at round-the-clock attention, the firs spiral skyward, chests out, heads narrowing up to fine points.
       "But you can hardly see the view!" I sputter.
       The Captain, escorting the Duchess carrying a tray of crystal sherry glasses, throws me a meaningful look. Then I remember the Ambassador is afraid of heights. I know this only because the Captain is also afraid of heights.
       While the Captain and his father huddle close to the balcony entrance doors sipping cocktails, I cover my words by hanging over the side rail, looking for an unblocked vista of any kind.
       "Look!" I call, pointing across a dozen rooftops through a space in the trees, "Isn't that an Alexander Calder mobile on the roof over there? See the bright red, yellow, blue spherical colors? It must be a Calder." My tone is one of awe.
       "Dreadful, isn't it?" remarks the Duchess. "Imagine putting that clothesline up on such a magnificent skyline. And the colors€so absolutely garish."
       The tropical medley of primary-colored flowers is due to be delivered in one hour.
       The rest of the visit is resituated to the safety of the drawing room, where we are now seated on a rare set of delicate-legged French Empire hand carved chairs with Napolean-blue-and-gold-leafed fleurs-de-lis painted backs. The conversation moves with the slow motion of a broken oven timer. I am desperate to escape and stop the florist before it is too late.
       We chitchat about the heirless prince and his unlikely marriage prospects. About the declining manners in the members-only restaurant at the Royal Yacht Club. About the latest new-money upstarts moving into town. About the high cost of living in a tax-free climate. That the help isn't what it used to be. That the Ambassador's valet talks too much, the cook is getting too familiar.
       The Duchess asks a few polite questions as to my line of work. I explain about art directors and clients and make sure to add a few supportive sentences about the talented Captain shooting for all the big-budget, five-star accounts.
       "I don't understand what my son does for a living, anyway!" declares the Ambassador with an undiplomatic wave of dismissal.
       The Captain looks pained.
       "Finish your drink, darling," calms the Duchess. "You know it's almost time for dinner."
       I move the conversation into her territory.
       "Didn't you find it difficult to leave your family behind in England when you moved here?" I ask the Duchess, wondering how the Captain and I can exit as gracefully.
       "Actually, I haven't given it much thought." She snaps closed the conversation.
       The Captain struggles to hold his back still, but I can see it is aching him. He hasn't stirred from his erect position on the delicate-legged chair for the entire hour. He makes a slight movement, an almost invisible twist to the left, to unlock the cramp in his thigh muscle.
       The Ambassador is eyeing his fifty-year-old son with increasing agitation.
       "Sit still!" he orders.
       The Captain can't. He adjusts his spine with a sudden spasm.
       And an uncontrollable lurch.
       The chair leg splits from its corner and the French Empire collapses.
       The Captain spills onto the parquet with a thump.
       "My Louis XVI chair!" barks the old man.
       "It can be mended, dear," soothes his second wife.
       "And you?" she asks, after the Captain rights himself.
       We are saved by the bell chiming on the ormolu clock.
       "Hurry," I urge as we make our escape out of the gilt elevator cage that has just descended ten floors to the lobby. "We've got to get to the florist before they close!"
       We are just in time.
       The uniformed footman is on his way out the polished brass-and-mahogany shop door carrying an eye-popping display of tropical flowers sealed in a swath of sheer cellophane.
       After a half-hour delay, the footman is on his way across the boulevard again.
       Only this time he is cradling an English garden of soft butter-cream-colored roses.