I

THERE WERE ONCE, SAID my grandfathers Jim—this was years ago—two sisters named Emily and Lottie Pardee, nice girls with pleasant enough small faces and ankles too, but they lived at the end of the town, and nobody could keep them in mind. Ever so often, people would suddenly remember this fact, that nobody could keep the Pardee girls in mind, and this would last for a while, but then that would pass out of mind too. Their parents had been the same way; they would be at church and at church suppers like anybody else, and they were invited to weddings too, like everybody else—and afterwards, when people were going over the affair in their minds, they could recall very well that the Pardees had been there. But scarcely anybody ever recalled afterward that they ever got to any of the really important places where things were transacted, like last minute phone calls to come to supper, or small meetings in the vestry or grange, which hadn’t been arranged for, or even picnics and pajama-parties, when they were young. And when the parents died, leaving the girls with the neat little house out of town to keep, and, it was said, a tidy little sum to do it with, alas, it was soon clear that they had been left this other inheritance too. For one might have thought that lots of young sparks would be drawn to that cozy fireside—even two at a time, since there were two Pardees—and that with the automobile coming in as strong as it was, there would be a double wedding out there in jigtime. But it just didn’t seem as if this would ever happen. There are some people born to live at the end of a town.

So what the sisters did, for they had a sort of quiet spunkiness between them, was to have a bay window cut into the front of the house, and they set up to boiling fritters in it and selling them to eat. The fritters were wonderful; sometimes they came out of the hot fat like a butterfly and sometimes like a blossom, but always they were miles lighter than a doughnut, and gone quicker. It was a queer kind of eating experience and a delightful one, but the kind more or less remembered afterward as a one-time affair, without needing to hunt for it again. People tried to be faithful, sometimes sent their children for a treat or came by themselves for takeouts, but a taste for fritters never seemed to settle itself to a time of day, enough for regularity, and there’s no doubt that the best business is regulation business. There was one young man named Jim, he used to come, it began to be said, some said always when Emily had her turn in the window; some said no, it was Lottie—but the truth was he couldn’t stand sitting in that lighted window, at the one little zinc table and wire chair. If they’d had two chairs and tables put in, it would have helped, but they hadn’t. He never thought to bring a mate with him at first, which would have helped matters too. For although he was a man, and even in those days, even without many automobiles, men could get about easier in love than women, Jim had a trouble not unlike the sisters. He had been born at the other end of the town.

I don’t know that this needs much explaining, even now. Though in his case, it wasn’t a question of railroad tracks but of barges. On the Erie Canal, there was always a part of barge life that was family and respectable; the wives and men too could go to Sunday church and did, though it couldn’t always be the same one, except now and then through the year. That was the difference. For the people of the upstate region—whether they live forty miles from a great lakeside or ten from one of the fingerling small ones—are a landlocked people. And they want it that way, though in those days, without so many cars and planes, you could see this clearer. It troubled them too, maybe, that their state was so various. The people in the towns and farms of that nor’nor’west part of New York State had given their hearts to the chasms and ravines mostly, and there wasn’t much left over for water. Winters, on the short, overcast afternoon when the dairy farm ponds were frozen, of course they skated them, and summers, many a canoe was flipped onto the smaller waters, of Honeoye maybe or Canadice or Hemlock. Otherwise, they sat in their tight dark winters, which the women hotted up with calico, and stared out at the numb farmland through air the color of an oyster; nine months of the year there is never much sun in those towns. Or they drove out to look at that hill near Palmyra where Joseph Smith the Mormon had his vision, or past Oneida, where a community had once hammered silver into free love. And when the barge people came to town—even though a family of these might get to their church several times a year, and come around steady as a season year after year, married as close as anybody and maybe as schooled too—the others looked at them with eyes that were the color of oysters, even though maybe they themselves had never seen one.

At least that was the way it must always have seemed to Jim, as a barge child. At times, he even went to school on land with the others, but although he had a last name like some of theirs, and once in a while even kin here and there, it was the once-in-a-while and the general scatter that did it; he might as well have been a gypsy, or one of the Italians from the wineries which had made a little Italy out of the hills around Naples and Hammondsport, who went to the Pope’s church. Or else it was the water itself that was an invasion to the others, the farm and townspeople, even though it was the found money that worked their truckland and wetted their apple orchards and humbled itself to carry down from the flour mills at Rochester and the knitting mills at Cohoes, and everywhere else. Summers of course, there was more roister on the canals, and the farm-boys meanwhile had their noses hard to the grind; if a runaway farmboy was lost to the barges, he might as well have been lost to the Indians in the days before these were all on reservations—for the amount of hullaballoo that was made. And even when Jim’s parents retired to the little wayside house by a bit of water, which was all that was left for him to return to after the war—and where else should he come?—still, for all the changes that had been made in towns and roads and people, there was still a lingering difference between him and them. A town that size always has people who remember its gypsies. And even if not, as Jim would often tell the mate he’d brought back to share the house—war-buddies, the town called them, quite fondly—even polite as the town was to him now, and even if he could see for himself that what with the house-and-lot developments going on everywhere (this was nineteen-twenty) that if he stuck around long enough he’d be an old-timer himself, still he’d be the one to remember, even then. Barge people had their own way of remembering, half land, half water.

It was all in the names of places, the difference between them and the town, he’d now and then say to the mate, across the deal table in the kitchen of the little house, after the dinner they’d cooked quite neatly, and just before they got down to talking, night after night, of what kind of business they’d go into after they’d saved enough from the fat, steady but no-account jobs they’d got into but wouldn’t stay at—no, not they. Jim’s mate had come from the coal mines of Pennsylvania out of Lancashire, England, when he was thirteen, and farmland was to him what the canals were to Jim—though to him, by an even more cut-off memory, it was of what he’d never yet had. He didn’t talk much, either of what he had had or he hadn’t, but he could sing of it now and then—and he could listen.

“It’s all in the names of the places,” Jim would say. “There isn’t a square foot of New York State that isn’t within spitting range of some kind of water—falls, rapids, lake or creek—and within day or two range of the great waters. You wouldn’t think that this inland fever would hit some people this way.” But it did. It was his contention that, let a New York town stand back only ten miles from a river and it called itself something like Middlesex or Woodsville, or Horseheads or Roseboom, or Painted Post. Nice enough names, but landhungry, in a town way; The canal names were another breed, wider and lazier, lots of them Indian or classical, or marined from elsewhere, or simply practical, like Lockport. “Three canals of the inland waterway, there were at the beginning,” Jim would say, in the special, swinging voice he kept for this use, though the voice itself knew that this was nearly nineteen-twenty-one, and the canals were done for. “The Erie, the Champlain and the Oswego. Then, only as far back as nineteen-oh-three—I was already eleven—they even voted to make way for the new big ones, to hold barges up to one-thousand-ton burden. Troy to Waterford, along the Hudson. Kept the old part of the canal, up the Mohawk, to Rome. Rome to Clyde, the canal takes in the Oneida and the Seneca. Rivers, mate. Westward from Clyde, it goes up to the Niagara, at Tonawanda. I was born Mohawk to Rome, just outside of Oriskany.”

“Aye,” would say his mate, who had never seen big water, not even from the troopship. By the map though, pulled out on the table for his education, he could see well enough that Jim had barely escaped being born outside of a town called Whitesboro one way and a Middleville the other, but he never pointed this out, nor the plain fact that many of the waterway towns had a landlubberly enough sound, and many of the mountain ones a wail of water. To him, the hills around here looked enough like Scotland to be Yorkshire, and he knew well enough what it was those hills—and what they had or hadn’t in among them—could do to people. If people here aimed to keep their feet out of water, no matter how much they had of it, it could be these powerful hills alongside, and so wild in the beginning, which had been to blame. Bears and bobcats, even now. But this he never said, either.

And all this was only after-dinner talk, transportation talk really, of the kind men always get involved in, even if it’s only how long by bicycle to Maple Avenue. Though, in their case, it was preparatory to whether the joint business would or would not be what had begun to be called a “garage.” Nor did the town’s semi-distant way with newcomers, or even with its own, much bother them; if the two of them spoke between themselves of such things, it was only a joshing way of admitting to each other that in certain ways they were shy. The town was a nice, pert one, with most of its clapboard in good condition, plus half a dozen mansions made of the small cobblestone that used to roll up on the shores of Ontario, and a lot of silent money in the sock—also not too many grannies with hair on their chins, or other characters left over from before the world got smart. Indeed, Jim and his mate often spoke of it, how it was in the air here that the young people were in control—or soon would be. It was just the town to make your way in, once you knew your way. And its name, if not the most dashing, still had bits of nature in it—Sand Spring.

Shy they both were, though they went everywhere with the returned soldier’s bold air of still seeing the world, and Jim’s mate blamed his own hanging back on his not being American enough yet. He was away on one of his surveying jobs, the two three times, three it was, Jim walked over to Pardees—which meant two miles to town, one and a half through it and four on the other side round by the lake shore. Oh yes, there was a lake in Sand Spring, but back of it there was a rack of hills, making the town a sort of valley—though like all the valleys in this double country it was only a temporary valley, between the hills holding their breath and the waters holding back. Anyway, it was a lot of walking just to appear casual, but to bicycle all the way just for fritters went against the grain, though it was the ideas of the fritters that got him—set up in a bay window for all to see, four miles out of town!—plus a little bit the idea of the Pardees.

For if those girls had been left none of that family business to go on with, it was no fault of their being women; women had run that sort of business before, just as women had now and then done the same on the canals. Whose fault was it, certainly not those two girls’, that there were getting to be no livery stables any more? It was something along this idea he had in mind, as he walked. He’d had women before; he wasn’t that sort, and except for just now he wasn’t even particularly backward with those you could marry. But at the moment, as he told his mate later, he was thinking of how the barges were going down, dropping down, derry-down, into a lock they’d never get out of—and how the livery stables were already almost gone. Those who lived by the wheel, or the clop-clop of a horse, or even water, were always being flung offside, and in the moment that whelmed them there was maybe a kinship between them, or maybe a warning, like those failed families that sometimes get together on a back street. Even for a bargeman, who always has some allowable thinking time, Jim had been a dreamy one—not that the mate was far behind. But these thoughts were not unlikely ones for any man who was thinking of setting up the first auto agency in a town, and nearly the first garage. In any case, this was how it came about that his idea of the Pardees wasn’t pushing at the fact that they were young women.

It was three times he went there, no, four. The first and third times he went, there was a crowd of others, or some. On the first time, as he told his mate later, they were just the selection of people you might see lined up outside a mechanical Dairy Cream bar on any roadside today, not important, you understand, but interesting just the same, and always about the same. Only this time, being of the neighborhood, some of them were in the house. But all the rest of it was queerish, or maybe just for those times, or maybe—just for him. She had set herself up in the bay window, you see, stove and all—and although there was nobody sitting just now at the ice-cream-parlor table and chair, she was going at it, wire basket dipping up, and a great bowl for the finished ones and a sweep of the powdered-sugar canister, and then back to the wire basket again—never done. And it was at her doings people were standing to stare. It was Emily. Lottie was back there in the front room, which had been cleared of its rugs and put down with lino, and she was flitting about as much as a roly-poly like her could, serving, serving from a tray and probably eating too, and—it was hoped—taking people’s money, though as he came up to the sight of it all, it was more like a lakeside party—that moment of a party when if stopped to be looked at, it is queer.

As he came up to the house, the sun was going down on the lake in front of it in a stew of orange, and behind it there was that grim, green light which always comes from lakeside woods at this hour—on a fuller body of water, one of the great ones, the light would have been blue. Or brown-black, he thought, though he hadn’t the idea quite yet how much the actions in the bay window reminded him of the way barge life was always moving, while the land and people stood still.

But what he did fancy to himself in passing was that what she was really doing, up there, was making the minutes into fritters, and when he went inside to taste them, he didn’t change his mind. “Quicker’n a minute,” one man inside even said, as he poked his child in the stomach. And it was true, just like it is true of some ice-creams even today; these fritters, really a kind of puffball with barely enough outer crust to hold them in life, were gone almost before you could taste them, no matter how many you had—and the child, after a number of them had been popped into him, opened his bewildered red face and began to cry.

Jim went outside again, to look. She was still making them, cooking up the minutes in that same hard and perfect way women will do handwork of the silliest pattern, as if it were important and admirable. Since that sort of handwork bored him stiff, he went away that time, but not without casting a look about for the stables—until he remembered that these would have been in town of course; this house, wintertight as it might be for the climate, would have been their “other house,” as people who had gone into town business here sometimes said of the home farm. Or else the Pardees, having lived long enough over the stable while the money was being made, might have bought this house later. Still, it was odd he saw nothing in the small barn, not even a wagon, or even on the back porch, a bike. But as he cast a look back over his shoulder he saw that they had the electric, even way out here, though they had waited until the very last of the real light to turn it on; people were sparer with the cost of it in those days, when it was still new. But now they had snapped it on, and with that, the party look was gone, and the place was only one of those halfway businesses with a porch still to it, and people going away from it to homes that were still all home. Enough fritters had passed by. It was time.

The second occasion he went there, he told his mate, he sat in the window at the table, there being no other customers except a neighbor child and baby brother she was taking care of, this being a choice house to hang around, of a Saturday afternoon. It struck him as a bad sign for business that nobody else was thinking of it as lively enough for their Saturdays, but he said nothing of this, though this time he and the sisters did get to talk. Lottie was the older by four and a half years, and just as clearly the baby; not that she was whiny, just that she hung back waiting to be told whatever, meanwhile nipping from the trays. It might have been thought that she was waiting for a man; some women eat like that when they are. But from what came out later, it would seem that, round and soft as she was, and always waiting to be told, and pretty in the face as a kewpie doll, she was one of those women who aren’t made for sex but for sugar, whole igloos of it, plus all the tender emotions—crabmeat patties to curd-cream—of a richly wooing diet; it wasn’t her fault if some man mistook the pink deepness at her neckline for something more than a roastbeef flame. Emily was quiet, but in a livelier way, and skinnier, from taking the lead. She had a small face, with two furry black eyebrows she was lucky didn’t meet in the middle, and large eyes that were either farsighted or near, but so vague they kept you from seeing how neatly her hands were going. From what the town said when it bothered, he knew she was lucky all round—she was the sort of girl who no sooner does she declare her intentions to go for a nurse, then her parents come down with bargain-rate last illnesses she can learn from, right at home.

So there he was, sitting up in the window, all asses’ ears and beer etiquette, not knowing whether he could look into the back kitchen, where the sun was still shining in from that side of the house, it being not yet one o’clock, or whether he ought to stare out at the lake. The two Pardees were enclosed in high aprons that tied at the back and dropped from neck almost to ankle, a kind that must have been bought at bazaars before their time and used to be worn by ladies when they served at such bazaars or went into the kitchen to oversee the maid. Here in the shop, these signaled that the Pardees were at your service, but ladies still. The kitchen, despite its moment of sunshine, was full of that kind of doubletalk; was this an outright shop or just an amateur operation; was this all just a pretty moment of fancywork for two healthy girls who didn’t have the nerve or the need to get work in town—or were the Pardees poor? And was this Sand Spring 1920, or Sand Spring 1898?

The sun dazzled a dishcloth, then moved ahead dead center over the roof, casting the pupils of all below into temporary shadow, and the whole sweep of the house, from bay to kitchen, into the nice gloom which came of knowing that in a short while the glare would strike the lake. Everything was live and fresh enough here, nothing dead or eerie or shut-in; not a yard from his nose, on a rack near the special stove which had been set in the window, other dishcloths and towels smelled of the outdoor ozone they’d been dried in—it wasn’t that. And if he wanted surety that he and the Pardees were alive and ticking, there, in a big iron pot as big as a cannonball, there were the minutes bubbling—it wasn’t that. Lottie was making the dough and Emily for the moment was feeding the sweet scraps to the two children as if they were puppies, though her job was to tend the pot, lifting and lowering the wire strainer, putting in the raw and taking out the finished, then a whisk of sugar and onto a plate, and all in a rhythm that knew beforehand how fast he would swallow; four minutes from now she would be once again at his side. If he ate five dozen of those things, he would still have eaten nothing but an hour.

He watched everything, nevertheless. For the life of him, he couldn’t have told later which sister had informed him that the proper word for what he was swallowing was baynays (from the French of a recipe come down from a Canuck in the family) but more commonly called bennies—or which had told him that the stove, a tall affair of many intricate drafts, warming ledges and ovenwells, grandly crowned by helmet-and-spike, and painted aluminum, was called “Bismarck.” Like many a couple who lived together, speak up as the sisters might separately, the effect was of unison. And why not, if then-experience of living was to be as unison as the Pardees’? Why else was it that if he asked some of the foolish questions in his head—which he wouldn’t, being already stretched enough by asking himself—or even if they answered willingly enough, which they couldn’t, they would still tell him nothing he and they didn’t both already know? For the doubletalk that was in the house wasn’t theirs or his; it was the town’s—and the fact that they all knew this already was what, past or present, made it a town. Otherwise, as he asked his mate later, why would it be that a man could come back from such a Flanders of a war, plus two years of schooling the war had gifted him with after, and still wouldn’t know his way in life any better than the town’s way, once he had plumped for the town? Out in the world back there, as back as far as Europe, for instance, he had known his way about with women, at least to the point of sleeping with some of them—and even before. Right now, as the mate well knew, back East, not four hundred miles away on the coastline of this same state, the world was full of flappers whose dresses wouldn’t reach Sand Spring until Sears, Roebuck chose to send them maybe two years from now—and whose manners would take a lot longer. Or was it that, back there, he and Jim had only passed through? But once Jim himself had got here, no matter what he might do—and he wasn’t fool enough to think that a lot didn’t get done here—the town would still make his conversation for him. By his taste for a freedom outside it and his stubborn wish to be of it, it had neatly returned him almost to the state in which he had left it, a watery young’un, Sunday scholar in its visitors’ pews, or at its back-row desks. Coming back to it was like coming to court must have been, in the old days; the gossip here was like a sieve. Yet the current was bouncy enough, returning him up down like a fountain, or a woman, for his help and his chastisement too.

He closed vainly on another bennie fritter. And found that Emily and another dozen were at his side.

This time, though she moved off almost at once, like a good waitress or a thoughtful lady-of-the-house, they held a silently monitored conversation. The town said (in him and for him) that her father, in his eagerness to make ladies of the daughters of a father in the horse trade, had kept her from all the things that even ladies were now doing. And in her and for her (no matter what Jim himself might say to her) the town would pretty well have taken care that she address him in one or other of the characters it held proper to him; whether it would be as a war-buddy, or as a fellow with his gypsy life not yet lived down, he’d soon see. Though surely, some pioneers in conversation broke out of the preordained.

He was to do it, too, though not then and there. By the time he’d swallowed up eight of those things, he’d remembered the vague kinship which had walked him over here. However, the decline and rise of transportation, and people with it, was too wide a subject for the soda-pop chair he was sitting on, so instead he put his fork in fritter number nine. He’d been using a fork all that time, finger freedom not having been offered. Then, at number ten, the sun, just as if it hadn’t been inching along all that time, reared over the house in a leap like a horse and struck the lake to white, and splashed all five of them inside there glare-blind. It was over in a second. Outside the bay window, a line of red cannas he hadn’t noticed before started up like an audience, all tongues. On number twelve, he spoke. “How you folks get to town from here?” he said.

He got several answers, this time slow enough so he could assign them to their dealers. To his surprise, Lottie spoke up first; he was to learn that she could speak up smartly enough when it was a case of what she couldn’t do, though the full extent of that wasn’t known even to her, until the end. “Never could get the hang of a bike,” she said, looking modestly down at what would someday be piano legs and hams, but right now, though bursting, were still young peony fat; he judged her to be about twenty-four.

Then Emily spoke, in a thoughtful way. “Shanks’ mare … might be … the best.” He wasn’t sure whether or not this was a statement, but it was the “might be” which got him, moving away his idea of her away from “one of the Pardees” almost to Emily—the idea of her being a woman, squeezing in between. He judged her to be old for her age, about nineteen, one year younger than the century, he being nine years behind her. The century line was still much in people’s ways of reckoning when he was a boy; you watch how it’ll be as the next one hoves to.

Just then, one of the next-door kids who were still underfoot, the girl one, spoke up, first giving a swipe to her baby brother for dribbling his sweater on the floor. She had one of the fritters between her small thumb and finger, and staring at Jim, she popped it in and ate it, even chewing as she spoke. He watched, fascinated, it being probably the only time human teeth ever got one of those things. So, her words came to him delayed. “Neighbors,” she said. “Ne-eighbors take them.” She drew down her long little jaw, making a face she must have seen somewhere. “Us.”

When he got out of there, after quickly paying his fifty cents for all you could eat, which was the arrangement, he stopped at a bend in the road to look back. There were obligations neighbors paid by right, or even goodness of heart, and still made faces over, which their children could copy. This still didn’t mean that the sisters were poor. The town said they weren’t. They might just have to be careful—which meant he needn’t grow a sympathy the pair hadn’t asked for, though as their only customer of the afternoon he felt a certain right at least to judge their enterprise. Why it should be a place where he heard the doubletalk so keenly, he couldn’t imagine; though in any town there were bound to be such places, he had always imagined them as more private. The afternoon was bordering on rain now, with the swift changes that came to these hilled waters. The stall in the bay window, dark as if it had given up hope of further trade now that the sun had all but gone underwater, seemed itself full of passing clouds. Of a sudden, as if the sun down under there had turned over, and the lake given up an aproned woman, her arm dripping, there flashed into his mind the simple reason for the stall’s presence. Those girls knew what the town’s verdict on them was, just as he and every soul around each knew of his own. “Nicer girls you’d never want to talk to—when you’re talking to them.” Some women wore flashy garters to keep people looking at them, or took lessons in coloratura. Those two had done it homestyle, dime a dozen or fifty cents an hour. It was their bid to stay in the eyes and minds and thoughts of people, not to be winked out.

When he got home, he tried to tell something of this to his mate, who listened willingly enough, and was moreover a man who never really forgot anything he was told, not anything—four and a half months later he would look up from his plate and say, “What’s about this Lottie, you once said.”

And what about people—aren’t the tags and loose ends and final catchings-up enough to break anyone’s heart? But at that moment the mate was just in from a trip which had taken in Cazenovia and Skaneateles, bully towns for auto setups or any other, both of them, and he was already wild on tomorrow’s trip over to Chenango and Wampsville; if it was left to him there was a real question whether those two wouldn’t have a chain of dream garages before they had a real one of them—and a homemade New York State atlas into the bargain. As for the other topic; once they had got the map, they lost it there. Maps take in people like that all the time.

And on the occasion of the third visit, Jim’s mate having gone down the Genesee to two towns just outside of Cattaraugus which he was sure to be in love with, their names being Almond and Angelica—see the map for yourself if you don’t believe me—Jim again went to the Pardees alone. But this time people, and gossip too, had got there before him. It was a Spanish War Veterans picnic, with the families of course, some of the granddaddies being from the Civil. The Spanish ones mostly weren’t even fair into middle age yet, some of them not much more than ten years older than Jim. It wasn’t the kind of continuity he was interested in, but it was the kind a man can’t avoid, even though his own war is hardly in the Legion clubhouse yet, except on the plaque to the dead.

Before he plunged in, his eye, which these days was seeing business thoughts everywhere, saw the place as a picnic grove with tables and docks and beaches, and even a place for boats-to-hire. Second thought told him it couldn’t be done—except by a stranger maybe—for it was not yet the town’s way to hire these things out, instead of just leaving them to be called on, or borrowed (though twenty-five years later, that shoreline was all cottaged and concessioned and pounded down like a beachhead; as for the woods in back, the jack-in-the-pulpits had long since taken their sermons elsewhere). He saw that the veterans had very kindly brought their own tables and chairs, and even more generously their own food, including the usual chocolate cake, which no doubt could be chewed. White pitchers stood on many of the tables. Though a few children were straggling untended in and out the side of the house, there was no trade going on from house to picnic; nobody except Bismarck was in the bay.

On his way there, two of the veterans who worked in his factory greeted him. At the door, a woman smearing a child’s happy mouth with a hard cloth nodded at him, turning out to be the night librarian where he sometimes went to read. Inside the kitchen, he saw only Lottie, peeping out, not cooking, though there were signs she had been—maybe a batch or two she’d been feeding the children for free. His mind made up at once what had happened to Emily; she had gone to be a nurse. He was neither disappointed nor pleased, recording merely the idea that Lottie was a woman too—and that either sister was more interesting when alone. Together, they were merely a situation. What he might intend to do, he addressed to that—it made no difference to him to which of them, as long as it was only one at a time, this being how his previous experience with women ran. He didn’t mind having an experience, in between the maps and the building-sites, even if it risked being a serious one, which in this town it sure would be—maybe it was time. But this day and age, a grown woman ought at least be alone for it. So he smiled at Lottie’s neckline, strode over to the table in the window and sat down—lucky he’d had no lunch. After four or five dozen of those things, he wouldn’t want any, though from the novelty of it and the rhythm of the girl at his side he might be left with richer appetites, like a love potion in reverse. Had the sisters thought of this too?

“Oh … but we didn’t—” said Lottie, and he stared at her, speaking there as if she were answering him, fat pullet-hands clasped at a chest with a depth curve in it like the beginning of a two-hearted valentine.

Then steps sounded, and with her long, light stride Emily came in; she must have only been to the bathroom, or in the house somewhere. Though she might have been his first choice if he’d been offered one, he looked at her now with some enmity.

“We weren’t going to—” Lottie said, a hand out toward the stove, her eyes on her sister. “Were we.”

Emily said nothing right away; she had that power, not always an easy one for a woman to have. It gave him time to wonder if the picnic people had angered the sisters into retreat by their not buying, or was it the opposite entirely, that the sisters were too delicate with acquaintances to push their trade? But more than anything, he wondered not only why he never thought of the town’s doubletalk as much as he did here, but why he never understood it better than he did here—though from all sides. It never occurred to him, the lake air being as calm as Hiawatha here, and the quartered-oak floor of the bay jutting out so strong upon it with its cargo of housewifery—that its owners might not know themselves why they did what.

Just then, the two men outside who knew him rapped on the glass. Weatherstripped though it was, it was no proof against their sharp summer voices.

“Which one is it, Jim? Can’t have ’em both. Where’s your mate?”

They kept up a chorus of this, knocking their tin mugs against the house, until a couple of the women came and got them, not without peering in themselves, though all that handwork women do makes them manage their eyes better.

“See what you’re in for, Jim!” one of the men called out, and the other man, with a grinning wave of the hand said something too, but the lake air sopped it away. The white gloom of the afternoons in these parts came and settled, temporarily taking away the spring; always in these parts the winter comes and stands for a moment, in any season. The two girls watched it, a land-ghost they were used to, but Jim thought of canal weather, different always from the very land it traveled, the mornings blue with their own business and boat-notions, even in a freeze, or a fog. As for other ghosts, no matter what the mixture of names was around Sand Spring, none of the three saw anything but what was immediate. White people didn’t see Indian ghosts. Nor do many in the modern age see classical ones—though those three would have a chance at it.

Lottie, at the glass, peered after the two men. “They must have been rushing the growler,” she said.

Jim stayed mum; in addition to his inborn barge-quiet, he’d learned in France to get along by watching expressions. But Emily had already seen his, having picked up that talent right at home.

“No,” he said, as if she’d pulled a string in him, “I don’t know what it means. Rushing the growler—what’s that?”

“You can see he’s never lived over a stable, or near a saloon,” said Emily thoughtfully and over his head—as if she and her sister were standing in their shifts, talking him over at bedtime. Again, like last time, he had a sense of messages given and taken between her and him, if only by being withheld. She hadn’t much of a neckline. No criticism—but the differentiation was going to have to start somewhere. He had a sneaking wish that one of the sisters could have had a sign on her somewhere, such as having the name of some former girl of his who had worked out, or a string of amber beads like his mother’s. To trust entirely to luck in these matters had always seemed to him a bit dirty; it was more gentlemanly to proceed from choice.

“Of course not,” said Lottie, equally over his head. “He grew up on a barge.”

They often talk like this, very literal, very simple—the sugar-people, the fat ones. From which other people take it that they’re as simple inside, and what’s worse, they take it so themselves.

Curiously enough, though he was thinking of them both in their shifts, it wasn’t Lottie he could see best, for all her marshmallow meat, but the other one. He could see her standing in hers in front of him, or even naked, thin and intense, more emotion to her than there was line, though she would have her points of it, and a little knock-kneed, like women with good legs often are. What he couldn’t quite see was whether she would be embarrassed. There was a chance she wouldn’t be. But what he could see—as clear ahead of him as that the men outside were still laughing and the sky behind them was a mackerel one—was that he would succeed with one of the sisters here. The question was—which?

Does it seem to you that the climate intervenes less nowadays in conversations? In the old days there was more climate of course, you can be certain of that; has to be, to make them the olden days. But surely the climate came and stood of itself more in conversation than it does now; it expected to be watched—a matter of all kinds of lore from skies to a wet finger held to the wind—and it gave you time. He wetted a finger and held it up so that either girl stood to one side of it. There to the left was Lottie, waiting to be told, a ripe fruit maybe, but bunched very close to the bough. And there on the other side was Emily, in her upper lip that willful, deep trough down which a kiss might well slide against duty. Which way the wind blew was plain as his forefinger between them. In the bay window, blank now, the afternoon, special property of women such as these two could well come to be, took over. Mornings were child’s gold and the evening belonged to the married, the courting or the social. Night, where it was not for sleep, was for hawks and harried travelers, and thieves. But in towns like these, whatever their names, the afternoons were the special property of the spinster. He squinted at the two sisters along the finger. They would never get separated until they married. They would never marry until they got separate.

“But your war-buddy,” said Lottie, “he was brought up in England.”

He nodded, though only a woman would say it that way instead of just plain “buddy”; still, it showed interest, and as he told his mate later, she was the first to mention him. Otherwise, he could see they had no intention of telling what “rushing the growler” meant (though he could guess) or rather, they meant him to tease it out of them in more of these stretched conversations—and suddenly he had had enough of it; he had passed over that hairline divide which always hovers between what a man can take of female activity, and what—no matter how lively his motives of love or rape are—he can’t. He’d had all he could take of this fancywork that placed the heaviest burdens of meaning on the lightest nothings, especially since he saw that Emily, making one of her quiet moves that somehow always’ drew more notice than Lottie’s louder ones, was now at the great gray-helmeted stove, which must have a property that most of its kind didn’t, of holding heat without showing it. Or, were there any others of its kind?

Now, when a house, an ordinary one by its neighborhood standards, it could be in Sand Spring or Flanders, begins to take on a special significance to a man (whether or not he can bear it), so that mere cakes become butterflies and stoves become eccentric or dear in character—and when that house has woman in it—take warning. For, in spite of all this heavy-light business, whimsy doesn’t come natural to women; most of the whimsy in the world comes out of the men. Look back on the books you were brought up on; see if I’m not right. Sure enough it was the sisters who had mentioned the stove was christened Bismarck, but who was to say what family historian or politicker had once named it? And who was it was looking at it now, thinking, as he said later, that it was looking right back at him through the grizzle-gray eyepiece of its armor like an old iron eunuch, not missing a thing or a person that came in the kitchen door?

From inside one of its ovens, Lottie drew out another of those black cannonball pots somebody had provided this household with, the dark ages maybe. This time it was a smaller version, of a size to contain a potion, but on her setting it in front of him it only disclosed more of those damned yellow fluffs—he couldn’t get one more down him now if he was blessed for it, or even if he was to be offered one of the women with it, she as nude as the fritter, both of them spitted on the devil’s toasting-fork. Outside the window, he saw that the tables were empty, the women and children scattered, most of the men of the picnic being gathered along the shoreline, strolling or in groups of jokers, and he longed for that pair who knew him to come and rescue him, with whatever guffaws. In the foreground, between him and them, on the table nearest to the window, one of their stoneware pitchers reared large, in another and a realer world. There was no barrier like a window. Mentally, he jumped through the glass—or the small Robin Goodfellow soul of him did, and landed neatly on the cold mouth-edge of the pitcher, just before it dove into what wasn’t lemonade, from what he could see of those waterside stragglers, but beer. Well—as he said to his mate later—luckily he was able to recall that there were still doors to that house, so he stood up politely enough, though he may have licked at his dry mouth a bit—and made ready to bolt.

It was Lottie who leaned across him—to pick up one of the dainties in the pot. That double valentine she carried in front leaned with her, in fact splitting wide enough to show him, since it wasn’t a whore’s and her sister was standing right by her, that some kind of mental innocent owned it. It wasn’t this that got him.

“Try one,” she said, and though he choked a bit, of course he knew that she was addressing the tiny eatable she held pinched between two cushiony fingertips—and wasn’t even really offering it either. In fact she was murmuring to it like to a baby.

“Day old, you’re different,” she said. “Way I like you best.” Then her lips parted softly, so that he saw the gleam on their jello-pink insides; then she nipped the poor thing—that’s the way he thought of it—between her milk-fine teeth, and it was gone, to what pinker recesses he could only imagine—and certainly did. But just before it went down her, the tip of her tongue came out partway to meet it, nothing gross, delicate as anything, indeed not like a bodily flicker, more intelligent. But it was this that got him.

You are all bound to think of us as a generation that didn’t scarcely smell the dark angles of closeness, fleshly closeness, much less speak of them; isn’t true of course—how do you think you all got here? Never trust what one century thinks of another, much less one generation. It was only that we didn’t speak out so much in a crowd as you do. And you seem to us like a solid row of tongues hanging out day and night for excitement, and only getting dry for it, in all that wind. We see you falsely of course—as falsely forward as you see us backward. Don’t you think I know that and so calculate my vision of us both? And when you are able to correct yours that way, what’ll you be? Old?

Anyway, it wasn’t too much of a mistake that saw Lottie’s tongue as the liveliest part of her, and jumped to her quick show of it as to a sexual flicker more common to other parts, which was where it took him. Not that he knew yet whether or not he’d made a choice.

For leave it to Emily, as was learned later, to take up a moment of surprise, hers or anybody else’s, and kick it further up the ladder. What she did, or he thought he saw her do, was to leap past him, through the window. Anyway, she leaned across him, just as Lottie had done, but without stopping—and without the neckline of course—and continued past him, her apron skirts in serene sail, with perhaps a bit of ankle added—a sight of some interest, though not as piercing. A next moment’s revision told him that she had merely stepped gracefully through the bay, which opened French-style—but by this time she was already back over the sill, with the white pitcher clasped to her, and a smile. And in all of this, there was no competition with Lottie, though there was certainly something, just what—he couldn’t say. She set down the pitcher firm center on the table, reached an arm behind her the way queens sit, without looking, and appeared to pick a glass from the air there—unless anyone wished to note that her tidy little rump backed against a shelf. She poured from the pitcher. He was so dry, he would have drunk chicken’s blood. It was beer.

She lifted her chin in time to his long swig of it, then bent her head again, tucking in her smile. “I rushed the growler,” she said.

Lottie giggled. “It means to go down to the saloon for beer,” she said. “And to bring it back in a pitcher. Or a can.”

So there the two of them were again, in unison.

Or maybe not. For Emily, pouring him another, spoke singly into it, so that the glass he took held her question as well. “What’s your … buddy’s name?” she said.

Jim looked into the glass before he drank, and it was a long moment before he answered. He was feeling that tickle of terror which comes from a person seeing ahead of him into life-probabilities which nature should have kept him from seeing, and ordinarily does. As his mate and he agreed much, much later, too late to be of any use, it was like looking at a map of the future—not dead cert, but a tour you could surely take—not knowing whether to learn it hard as you could, or to screw up your eyes and run on the double away from it. For there was Lottie, her eyes bright as candy in a curved jar. And sitting at the small table he had just deserted, leaning those heavy eyebrows on her knuckles, that girl who every time he saw her he thought should have been blackhaired, not brown. And here he was, and his mate, bumbling all over the map of New York by day, but—by this other map—not far. Any of them could count up the possibilities; perhaps these two already had. He was struck with the terror of it, and the charm. Two and two—but which?—makes four.

“My … mate?” he said. The word buddy, for the comic strips, the sob-sisters of the Stars and Stripes even, and for the town of course—never crossed the two men’s lips. “My mate’s name?” He smiled to himself, a true bachelor’s smile, for from the odd-timeness of jobs and even meditation, he and his mate spent more time alone than the dinners they had together, though when these came about, the talk and the silences matched well enough; this was what it meant, having a mate. He let the smile broaden to include anybody in the room. “We’re twin-names,” he said. “I thought you knew.”

On the sill where she had stepped over, a feather rested, blown in from nesting maybe though it was early for that, a clean feather silk-smooth at the top, not separated anywhere, with a fluff toward the pen-tip of it, from some middle-sized bird, nothing fancy, but whose tail nobody had yet put salt on. He smiled at it too. The sisters knew of the names, his and the mate’s; there wasn’t a chance that they didn’t; in a Sand Spring, the structure of the gossip at least let one see what were impossibilities too.

Gently he reached down and picked up the feather. He wasn’t a picker-up of pins or a sufferer from any of the nerve twitches that came in about ten years later, but to a boy grown up on a deck, the soil that was so wild and itinerant under the feet of shore boys was always precious, as well as any stray pebble and shot from it. Whereas to a boy from the coal caverns, as his mate always remarked, a clean deck to walk on would have been like silver, and the towns the mate fell in love with, one after the other, were always clean. The two of them were opposites then, not unlike a pair of sisters. And this was enough of parallels, at least for now.

He had no hat on, ever, so just before he bolted, he put the feather behind his ear. “Maybe that’s why we came to be buddies,” he said from outside, leaning back into the bay again. “My mate’s name is Jim.”