NEVERTHELESS, SHE AND I LEFT FOR Greensboro the next morning. Once a winter she and I went to see her parents, now removed from the small manor farm which had been my maternal grandmother’s inheritance to a tiny white town house, where I was able to learn the real etymology of indling, or the temperament, and how breakfast on a tray could still be managed for all, even on a small pension, if you still had an in-coming black. Up North, my mother had simply kept the temperament. That winter, although we had come on such short notice, we would stay longer than we ever had. “What with one thing or another—” my mother phoned or wrote my father back home—though she never said precisely what, we would not return again until well through spring.

On the train down there, she was restless; she had forgotten her chocs, she said. That alone would have shown the power of the distress under her neat suit, toque, and fur. But I had picked up a box on my way to the car. Father of course had driven us to the station.

“Honey, I’m so touched,” she said to me, once we were in the train. “You have the memory of a Southerner.”

“And we can buy chocolate bars from the vendor who comes through,” I said, basso with responsibility and praise. “Soon as we get beyond Philadelphia they still have them. Vendors.” I was already remembering what you had to remember if I was to be as my mother had said. Napkin-rings all round, not just for babies. Bibs on the babies. Parties with old ladies at them. If the babies and the small children were there also, a “dawky”—a word my mother said I was not to say, would be there to take care of them. Whether or not I said it, the girl would be there. My other grandmother, a fine contrast to my severe Jersey one, would feed us up “as if our livers are to be made into pâté,” my grandfather would say, proud. After that, his free-to-coarse speech would be curbed, at least at table. The women loved to. We two would have a round of obligations, attending to which we would acquire the fierce, if temporary local opinions which made it easier. Any eccentricities I had, if interesting and not too troublesome, would be praised as individuality. In return, I would have to drawl, not cross my knees in company, and giggle when there were boys. Compared to Phoebe Wetmore’s brother Bill, they would still be boys.

“Have a choc,” she said.

I took one, careful as always to take the nougat she didn’t much like, though when she caught me at it she would make me take a truffle creme, not suspecting, I thought proudly, that I didn’t care which.

She took one of the pink bonbons she usually left till last—often saying they melted on the tongue like leisure itself. The train made our wrists brush. She was wearing the gold bangle.

“Very distinguished—” she said, “twenty-two carat. Not eighteen.” Might this mean the mistress was given the eighteen-carat stuff? But was that the only reason she was wearing it? She rarely wore her own good jewelry, substituting the odd little bits of Bakelite now known as Art Deco. She only liked to have the other by. She caught my eye. “Your Greensboro grandmother will be pleased to see this. It will make up for our not having a maid.”

We munched, while the last pig-towns of Jersey raced backward, unable to hold us. I would miss them, yet still be full of new delight. Father would miss us too. But he had New York. And the lady.

“I think—I think he gave it to you—for you.” This was daring.

She sat up. “Why?”

Because of the bobby-soxer. But, looking at my own legs, the accordion-pleated skirt, the whole outfit—I found I couldn’t say it to her. “Because—you’re you.” And that was true, too. We never lied.

She sat too formally straight for the fields of smashed cars and other rusted iron we now were passing. She even closed the chocolate box. “Tell me. Do you think—you know too much?”

That depended. Had she noticed last year in Greensboro that I no longer giggled at men—even at uncles? Did she know that Bill Wetmore no longer regarded me as merely his kid sister’s friend? Or that when we lay upstairs in the loft of the old outbuilding, once a hayloft, that now served them for garage, while he spoke of his great-grand-uncle, the Beaux Arts sculptor he meant to emulate, and I of the painter I wanted to be in spite of absolutely no background for it—that we had no longer merely nestled? Or that I had stopped going there altogether, the day after Phoebe, who had only a grandmother to inform her, had told me what she said no one else but them knew—that my mother visited Craig Towle in his nearby house? To tell me had seemed for a minute still friendship, if misguided, or—in the arcanum of what the Wetmores already knew about us—even an ever deferent old-town function. Until Phoebe had added, lip retracted, “Maybe these days, for what both of you come down here for, she could give you a lift.”

“Take your time,” my mother said. “Or don’t answer at all. Or not yet.”

I thought of all I knew because of her—which was what she was asking. How, at the rare times we went to New York as a family, I lost myself in fancy on the side streets of where I meant someday to paint all streets, and to be the mistress as well of somebody who had no wife. How, in the very scene we lived in, I would never have sensed the layers of things, even to the small, severe still-life judgments between truffle and nougat. Or to the way the lip retracts in jealousy, even on an otherwise nice young girl. Without my mother, I would never have had the hayloft courage to do what I had done with Bill Wetmore, which I did not regret then, and do not now. Even at this moment, she was teaching me the difference between fast and slow.

If the parents don’t burden us, they cannot teach us. I didn’t know that yet, but I answered, and joyously.

“Never. I can never know too much.”

She smiled. That’s my girl. She whispered it really, bowing her head. “Your father would not agree.”

Though I was desperately fond of him, here he seemed an intrusion. I did not mind that he thought as he did. Though I would never fault her, he was the brake. Because of him, I had an inkling I would one day do as she had: I would marry well.

But at the moment, her mention of him confused me. Was she running away from him, or from Craig Towle?

Perhaps she saw my state. Her way was to confuse me further, but always one step ahead. “Would you like to know something I know about you?”

If she saw my scare, she also saw I was ready. To be told I was illegitimate? Or destined to suffer a rare hereditary disease? No—this she would have managed to let me know. But suppose she had seen that I was not going to be able to do what I thought I was fitted for?

Anyway, she put her arm around me, which was rare enough to be valuable. Under her pushed-back cuff I saw that she was wearing another bracelet entirely, a broader flash of torqued silver, the purest, worked with many angled forms of onyx and jade—what must surely be the lustrous Paris progenitor of her Bake-lite.

We both looked at it, hung there at my shoulder. “Came last week,” she said. “I can’t send it back. That would be bad taste. And they’ll have only that small mailbox out there.” So did we. But out there always meant the old town. I could see the mailboxes, the Towle one not too far down the lane from the Wetmore’s. And the bobby-soxer, going to it. “Bracelets,” my mother said, squeezing her eyes shut. She opened them. “Here—why don’t you wear it.” She quirked at me. “Forgive me, but on you they won’t know it’s real.” She put it on me, kissing the wrist she clasped it on.

“Is that it?” I said. “What you know about me.”

“Why, darling.” Her face crumpled. So had mine. “No, never,” she said. “Never.” I thought I heard an echo. “Never” always made one. She put her lips to my ear. Lovely lips—I never saw them retract. I hear her whisper. “I know—that you really don’t like chocolate.”

Then we embraced, as the train and we flung ourselves forward onto the long green fields.