FOR MANY YEARS, the chancery clerk in Loring County was Robert Worthington. Back in the ’60s, while a member of the Citizens’ Council, he wrote incendiary letters to Ellis Buchanan and the Weekly Times, alleging all kinds of devious behavior by black people involved in voter registration drives and those few whites like Ellis who supported them. The person he hated most, it seemed, was Charlie McGlothlan, the attorney who led the boycotts and eventually got crop dusted in front of the courthouse. In one letter, Worthington stopped just short of calling for his lynching.

By the beginning of the next decade, though, he’d experienced a change of heart. In 1972, he supported McGlothlan for the state legislature, and even though Charlie lost and never ran again, that was the first of many political campaigns on which they collaborated. When I moved back to Loring to start teaching, Worthington was one of a handful of whites who still voted Democrat beyond the local level. A delegate to the 1984 National Convention, he pledged to Walter Mondale.

Around then, Jennifer and I took a trip to the East Coast to visit battlefields and monuments and art museums, take in a few poetry readings and browse used bookstores. In Philadelphia one day, I picked up a copy of the Inquirer, and whose face should appear on the front page, with the Loring County Courthouse in the background, but Robert Worthington’s? The article detailed how he’d gone from being an ardent foe of civil rights to a devoted champion.

There on the street, just a block or so from Constitution Hall, I got tears in my eyes. I’d never met Mr. Worthington, but that didn’t matter. I knew where he was from and understood just how far he’d come, so I bought several more copies of the Inquirer, folded them neatly and put them in my suitcase. A couple of weeks later, when we got back home, I looked up his number and called him.

This was in the days before the Internet, so while he’d known the article was coming he hadn’t seen it yet. Since I was the first person he’d heard from who’d read it, he asked me to come right over.

When I got there, he’d just made a pot of coffee and offered me a cup, which I drank at his kitchen table while he read the piece. He was about sixty then, still serving as chancery clerk, married to his high school sweetheart, a woman, he said in the article, he’d loved for forty-five years. She wasn’t at home that day. As I recall, she’d gone shopping.

He was an old man who possessed no unusual gifts, as far as I could see, but he’d started his life in one world and adapted to another, and it occurred to me, sitting there watching him read, that he was the most curious kind of immigrant, one who lived right where he’d been born. When he finished and laid the paper down, I told him how I’d felt there on the street in Philadelphia. It was the first time, I said, that I’d ever been proud to come from Loring, Mississippi.

That remark seemed to take him by surprise. “Why?” he asked. “Why would this article”—he tapped the paper with a stubby finger—“make anybody proud?”

“Because you knew you were wrong,” I said, “and you were man enough to change. That’s a rare thing.”

“Oh, son, every day somebody quits doing something he knew was wrong, for the same reason I did, and there’s nothing special or heroic about it.” It must have been obvious that I hadn’t followed his reasoning, so he went on to explain. “I didn’t tell this to that Philadelphia reporter, because I knew he couldn’t understand. But I imagine you will. The truth is, I don’t like black folks. Never have, never will. Now, that’s a weakness of mine, and I know it. But trying to convince yourself you’re right when you know you’re not—well, it gets to be too goddamn much trouble, son. It’s just a whole lot easier to give it up.” For a minute, I thought he’d leave it at that, and I wanted him to, so I could excuse myself and escape this disappointment. Instead, he added: “If my experience’s any gauge, though, I have to admit that doing right’s a lot less satisfying.”

Spending time with Maggie was the most satisfying thing I’d ever done, so I tried to convince myself it wasn’t wrong. Jennifer, I told myself, didn’t really care that much about sex anymore—the last few years offered perfect proof—but what she did care about, and what any woman would, was being treated with kindness by her husband.

Therefore, I reasoned, my involvement with another woman, at least while it lasted, might actually make our marriage happier. I started making breakfast for Jennifer, getting up before she did and brewing her tea and fixing her oatmeal. The first couple of times it happened, she was thrown into confusion. “Have you switched from coffee to tea?” she asked me, standing there in her rose-colored bathrobe with yet another thin book tucked under her arm.

“No, the tea’s for you.”

“Are you eating oatmeal?”

“No, that’s for you, too.”

I saw her glance at the wall calendar, wondering if she’d forgotten some special date, but the nineteenth of October was just another day. “All right,” she said. “Thanks.”

I poured a cup of coffee and sat down across the table from her, leaving the Commercial Appeal in its wrapper. She glanced at the book of poems—the title was a real eyepopper, The Beauty of the Husband—but I guess she thought it wouldn’t be quite right to pick it up and start reading. “I had a pretty good class last night,” she said. “There’s a bunch of older people in it and they all did their assignments, which was really quite amazing. Normally, in that night class you get the dregs who put off registration until nothing else is left.”

The previous afternoon I’d gone over to Maggie’s for the fifth Wednesday in a row. We’d sat on her couch for a while, drinking and talking, and before long she disappeared into the hallway and returned with two photo albums. We looked at pictures of her and her husband in Japan, Argentina and Saudi Arabia. They’d even been to the Himalayas—a few shots taken in a Sherpa village, both of them soused on rakshi, which she said was a potato brew similar to vodka. Her husband had gray hair and a square chin, and it only dawned on me later how much he resembled Arlan Calloway.

I couldn’t imagine how looking at those pictures made her feel, knowing that the man she’d spent a quarter century with was now gone, and I said so. “When he was dying,” she said, “the worst part was sitting by the bed in the hospital and facing his optimism.”

“He was probably better off, remaining optimistic.”

“Probably. But until then he’d always been such a realist, and that’s what I loved most about him. The first time he found out I’d been sleeping with another man, I cried and promised I’d never do it again, if only he’d take me back, and do you know what he said? He said, ‘This is a measure of what you mean to me: I’ll take you back knowing full well I will go through this again and again.’ And he was right.”

“And now you feel terribly guilty about it?”

“I am guilty. And I would be whether I felt it or not.”

“Do you wish you hadn’t done it?”

She shook her head. “I could say yes, but what would that be worth? I did it. It’s a fact. And now I’m doing it again.”

I pointed out that there was one crucial difference: she was no longer married.

“Yes,” she said, “but you are. And I imagine that for whoever keeps tabs on this, it’s the same thing.”

“We could stop,” I said, though I didn’t mean it. Maybe she could, but by that point, I knew I couldn’t—or wouldn’t, anyway, of my own accord.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not anytime soon. We’ll have to get caught and be humiliated.”

After that sobering exchange, neither of us said anything for a while, and then I asked a question that had been on my mind ever since she came back with those photo albums. “You don’t have any pictures of your mom, do you?”

She closed the one that was lying in her lap. Several seconds passed before she made a sound, and when she did it was just to heave a deep sigh.

“What?” I said.

“I knew when I went to get the albums that you were going to ask. But then you didn’t, and I’d just about decided you wouldn’t after all.”

“Look, if you don’t want to go there, it’s all right. Forget it.”

“Oh, but I already am there. Or I guess I should say I’m already here.”

“Please,” I said, as she got up off the couch and gathered up the albums, “really, just let it go.”

She went off down the hallway, leaving me sitting there feeling like a member of the paparazzi or, worse yet, a plain old voyeur. A few moments later she returned with a frayed manila folder, sat down beside me and opened it, and there stood Nadine Calloway, in black and white, eye to eye with an enormous dark-colored horse whose nose had a lighter streak down the middle. Her left hand was reaching out to pet it, and her mouth was open as if she were talking to it. Her dress had padded shoulders and a cinch around the waist.

My throat felt constricted. I was afraid that when I spoke, my voice would come out as a croak.

Maggie saved me the trouble. “As you can see,” she said, “I don’t look anything like her. If I thought I did, we wouldn’t be where we are. I don’t want to be a substitute for someone else. Not even my mother.”

My voice was actually more like a squeak. “What?”

“You always had such a crush on her,” she said. “It was worse than most little-boy crushes, and I sometimes wondered how it made your mother feel. I guess it didn’t bother her, though, because she adored my mom. Everybody did.”

“You aren’t a substitute for anybody,” I said, “and nobody could take your place.” I spoke without thinking, saying what I believed the moment called for, and it wasn’t until later that I realized I’d inadvertently told the truth. She’d created a desire nobody else would ever satisfy. When she went back to North Carolina—and I reminded myself every day that she eventually would—she wouldn’t leave behind a hole. She’d leave a bloody wound.

She pulled off the top snapshot and quickly showed me the two underneath. In the first, her mother had stepped away from the horse but was still looking at it, her head cocked slightly to the side, her right hand shading her eyes. In the second, they’d turned away from each other, the horse’s left foreleg a foot or so off the ground, beginning to bend, and her mother’s right hand was raised, thumb in the air, seemingly gesturing backwards at the horse. It looked as if she was speaking to the photographer, since she was staring right at the camera and her lips had formed a word. Whoever was taking the pictures had stepped farther back before snapping the last one. You could see a wooden post and a couple strands of wire between the lens and Nadine.

“That’s an electric fence,” I said. “See this little white thing there?” I pointed with my fingertip. “That’s a porcelain insulator.”

“A little electricity never scared her. I remember that she crawled under it, dress and all.”

“What was the occasion?”

“She wanted my father to buy that horse.”

“I don’t recall your having one.”

“We didn’t. He said no. Then he laughed and offered to get her a riding mower instead.”

“Whose horse was it?”

“Just one she saw beside the road. Somewhere nearby. I’ve thought several times in the last few weeks that I recognized the spot. But lots of things look different now with all these fish ponds where the cotton used to be.”

She put the snapshots back in the same order, then closed the folder. When she looked at me, there was no missing the moisture in her eyes. “Satisfied?”

“Sure. Thanks for letting me see them. I guess I overstepped a boundary by asking.”

“Well, we’re stepping over every boundary we can find. What’s the harm in one more?”

She carried the file back down the hallway, and left it wherever she kept such things, and when she came back we grilled a couple of steaks and ate dinner in her kitchen, drinking a bottle of the best French wine I’d ever tasted. I asked her where she’d gotten it, and she said she’d gone to Memphis on Saturday and bought it at Wild Oats. When we finished, we dumped the dishes in the sink and then she said, “Would you like to go upstairs?”

While I made love with a woman who’d driven one hundred seventy-five miles in search of better wine than she could find in Loring, my wife was feeling happy because she finally had a few students who’d read the essays she’d assigned and turned their work in on time.

The next morning, when I thought about that I was so moved that I reached across the breakfast table and laid my hand on Jennifer’s. She flinched. “What?”

“I love you.”

“Oh,” she said, “is that right?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s right.”

“Okay.” She gave my hand a little squeeze.

She finished her oatmeal, and while I showered she went into the study and was sitting at the computer, staring hard at the screen, when I left the house. I don’t think she even heard me say goodbye.