‘NO PROVENANCE, GEMMA!’ SHERM said, horrified, peering at the Prendergast. Although he and Kit own quite a few works of art, in that Puritan household these look as if they have done so only by intentionally avoiding the ugly baroque, the crowded Renaissance; Opting only, if most chastely, Rupert says, for the hallowed modern. Each piece, like rut’s pendant, has a story, and is so displayed. A one-string Calder mobile, signed ‘Sandy,’ with an adjacent photo of the children’s party it was made for. The tablecloth on which Barnett Newman one night wrote scurrilously. An early Rothko nude, dating from before the artist went abstract, and this time admittedly of Kit—though quite austerely.

Plus what must be a unique collection of small drawings, plaster casts, pastels, even an oil or two—one of them by Eilshemius, as I recall—and all by well-known but unstable artists whom Sherm had a habit of visiting in their temporary asylums or hospitals. A vocation that came over Sherm, as his books will tell you, when he left off being a Communist.

So all their art has the ultimate provenance: Gift of the Artist. Even if, for more than half of those, the proper qualification would be: While temporarily insane.

‘We bought that picture, Sherm,’ I say. ‘That’s all we know how to do.’

Rupert says, ‘Gemma.’ But I doubt they noticed. I want them to.

‘You don’t have to like it, Sherm,’ I said. ‘Until you know for sure.’

‘Same old Gemma,’ he says. ‘I only meant—if it’s real, you better have it insured.’ He looks around the kitchen, and at us. ‘Or better still, sell. You could get a pretty penny.’

They think we need money. In the bedroom Kit had obviously thought so, seeing the bed. Years ago they offered to buy it for their spare room, until they found we had lengthened the side rails, making it no longer ‘mint. ‘That lovely old tester,’ she says now. ‘It ought to have a handmade spread. Like ours, remember?’ They have a sleigh bed for themselves, handsome enough but not quite right for a Revolutionary house. ‘And that mattress. I don’t believe it. It isn’t the same one?’

Rupert calls it our swan-boat mattress, and indeed it almost is. That deep hollow.

‘Those humps are dear to us. I don’t expect to change it now. I send it out to be cleaned once in a while.’ Or did, until the only cleaner who would take it on—a little tailor on Sixth Avenue—died. No department store cover will fit its worn-in curve; But we two still do.

She’s squinting at me. ‘You’ve kept your neck.’ She hasn’t. She arches one ankle, though. Legs still good. ‘If there’s one thing I promised myself, though—never let my hose droop. You see them on the street. It’s a sure sign.’

I’ve seen them. Old women often otherwise well dressed. But with no one to tell them maybe that the slip is showing too.

‘I only do it in the house. These old lisles. I must have had them since the war.’ Which war? ‘I like the slidey feel of them.’ It tells me I’m still in the house—this house.

‘We elder women shouldn’t keep clothes that long, Gem. It’s not good for us. I remember that blouse.’

I can shrug that one off. If your shoulders will still take old peasant blouses, why not? ‘That’s a nice suit, Kit,’ I say. ‘Custom-made, I’m sure.’ She would have to, with that belly. Such an odd-shaped little dropsical one. For a minute I mourn for us. What a lovely giraffe she was, once. Where did that neck go? And what an old fool I am. Or as she would say—elder fool.

For I know they intend nothing but harm.

‘I do have one of those bedspreads,’ I say. ‘Dated eighteen forty-six. Somehow we never get to use it.’

‘Eighteen forty-six, eh?’ She looks thoughtful. ‘Maybe we could swap you. Something you could use.’

‘I’m saving it for Christina. You know she’s pregnant?’

‘No! At her age? She must be past forty. And out there?’

‘The Saudis have one of the best hospitals in the Near East. And my mother had me at forty-eight.’ After a string of others, all stillborn, but why say? ‘Maybe we’re late bloomers.’

She and Sherm never meant to have kids. If Sherm gives off the feel of a boy born to a large family, not one member had ever appeared East, or in his autobiographies. And in their crowd, in that heyday, having offspring wasn’t the arty thing to do, except by accident—say if the woman in the case died of a bad abortion, leaving some heartbreaking posthumous poems. Otherwise it was culturally tacky to add to the human race. But then they had Daphne—born, as Sherm would jovially tell you, when they were on homemade mead their first year in the New Hampshire house, and ‘when my good eye was shut.’

Daphne took all her father’s farm-talk and population disdain seriously, also his freeloading style. As a consequence, she now grows Jerusalem artichokes, elephant garlic, and other rare fodder on the California estate of the patroness with whom she has adopted a baby. Of which baby Sherm, in one of those opportunistic flashes that according to Rupert have for fifty years kept him the only conservative to be printed in the liberal journals, and vice versa, immediately wrote: ‘our Lesbian grandchild.’

Kit’s sharp eyes are roving our bedroom. It’s an active room, no doubt of it. Twin clumps of books and Kleenex at the bedsides, and a scatter of other intimate objects—nasal inhalator, neck pillow, body lotion—which we use as one. Maybe she can tell that. There’s also a jolly patchouli smell I want no housekeeper ever to get to the bottom of; it means us. The bed is made up but our nightclothes are tumbled on it. We don’t intend to be this graphic but I guess we are.

‘You don’t mean to say—’ Kit says, ‘Gemma, do you mean to say you and Rupert still—?’

I don’t mean to say—and she knows it.

We hold it there. Then, just as she and I used to do when she and Sherm—that rising young columnist, middle-of-the-road arbiter, and prospective elder statesman—still dropped in on us whenever Rupert rose a step or two—we went into the kitchen to join the boys.