Extreme Magic

OVER THE ROLLTOP DESK, in the handsomely remodeled barn which Guy Callendar used for antique shop and home, he had hung, among other things, a present once given him by another dealer for obvious reason—a thinnish old almanac whose heavily scrolled frontispiece bore the title, in letters to suit: The Resourceful Calendar—for 1846. Printed McGuffey reader style on the good old paper of the era, its blunt, steel-engraved homiletic for weather, crops, and the general moral behavior taken for granted by its readers, had withstood the finely manicured air of the Hudson River shoreline some miles above Garrison, New York, for almost as long as he had—seven years. He liked to see it hanging there, a tightly integrated little universe whose assumptions were only as yellowed as its paper—including that flourished motto which, despite its missing “l,” seemed indeed intended for his life, for him. He had never known whether or not the giver had known his history.

At the moment he was busied in converting an old Rochester lamp, object and task both rather out of line for a shop owner who seldom bothered with the humbler Victoriana and had his own finisher, but these pretensions were his trade’s and the neighborhood’s, not his own. The lamp belonged to a neighbor—if one could give that name to Sligo and his wife Marion, proprietors of an old waterfront “hotel” ten miles up the shore, really a restaurant-bar of the land smartened up with horse brasses for the Saturday afternoon country squires. And Callendar liked any task which let him look continually up and out at any one of the weathers of his own acreage, modest in size, but vast in trees through whose ancient swirl, layer upon layer toward the river, he could see, like a natural fence that gave him the limits he still so needed, glimpses of the waterline, even of the sky—but not of the opposite shore. For this he had bought the barn on a day’s decision, and the barn, in turn so neglectedly beautiful, so rescuable and then so emptily waiting, had brought him by gentle nudges to a trade that was no more out of line than any other for a man so nearly out of life.

Ten years ago, he had been an ordinary young man of thirty-one, living with wife and three children—an infant, a boy of seven and a girl of two, in a split-level cottage in one of the developments outside Hartford, Connecticut, working as a company man for the largest in the constellation of insurance underwriters in that city, and doing well enough. Born nearby, married to a town girl, he had come of that lower-middle native stock, in name often resonantly Anglo-Saxon, which the boys from the great schools studding New England called “townies”—a class that, with the will, the luck and the proper scholarships, frequently ended up years later socially alongside of those same boys. With some of the luck, two army-earned years at an obscure business college, and no will beyond that of someday having his own agency, he had been contented enough, unlikely to end up anywhere except much as he was. But that year, while he had been away at the company’s convention plus special classes for men of his caliber, his house, catching fire at dead of night in a high November wind, four miles from the nearest hook and ladder and no waterpower when they got there, had burned, with all his family, to the ground. Two owners of badly scorched houses adjacent had urged him to join their suit against the contractor whose defective wiring had already been the subject of complaint. Even if he had been able to overcome his horror, there had been no need; as a model employee, he had had Ellen, little Chester, Constance, and even the baby heavily overinsured in every available form from straight life to special savings plans, college plans, mortgage, fire and endowment. He had managed to survive all the obsequies, the leaden vacation in Bermuda insisted upon by his office manager, even the return to a furnished room and restaurant meals in the best businessmen’s residence club in Hartford. It was only when the indemnity money came in, thousands upon rolling thousands of it, that he had gone out of his mind.

The phone rang. “Guy? Polly Dahlgren here. How are you?”

“Hi, Poll, how are you?” An Englishwoman, widow of a Swedish ceramist, she had continued to run their gift shop at Orient Point, the farther tip of Long Island, a place he imagined to be a seashore version of Garrison, in terms of quiet estate money ever more fringed by a louder suburbia, with here and there an air pocket for people like themselves. He had been careful never to see it, though now and then she asked him down, and he liked Poll. She liked him too much for a man who could only like. “What’s on your mind?” He’d said it too fast, sad for them both because he already knew.

“Those silver luster canisters you said you’d seen a set of someplace, a dealer’s. Near where you fish.”

“The Battenkill.” It was the first place he’d gone from the hospital, in the beginning with another patient, the stockbroker who’d taught him flycasting, then, for every one of the years since, on his own. “But that was last April.”

“Collector down here went wild when she heard about them. Pay anything, if they’re what she wants.”

“They wouldn’t cost all that much,” he said. “About two hundred for the four of them. If they’re still there. They just might be. I could find out for you. Or she could go see.”

“Invalid, can’t. I do a little legwork for her now and then, expense-paid of course. Nice old gal.”

“Well, why don’t you?” he said. “Beautiful country in August. And five or six dealers strung out along one lovely road. Not too far for a three-day weekend. With the parkways.”

“Where is it, did you say? And the name?”

“Vermont—New York border,” he said, “the Battenkill.” He couldn’t keep the dream of holy peace out of his voice, the years of gratitude. “The most beautiful trout stream in the world.” He’d never seen any other.

“I might just do that,” she said. There was a pause. Then she spoke brusquely. “Like to go with me?” Into his silence, she said abruptly, “For the fish.”

“Thanks, Poll, but I can’t—” Get away. She knew he could, any time. He plumped for the truth, at least some of it. “It’s particularly a place where I like to go alone.” As he went most places.

“Right!” she said at once. “Nice of you to tell me that.” She understood that he had given her an intimacy. He did like her. “And now, give on those names.”

He gave her the lot, extra warmly. This was what he was good at, and where he could be generous. “Don’t bother with the Graysons if you’re in a hurry. Retired couple, he’ll want to talk and she’ll want to show her collection. Goes in for ruby hanging lamps and anything doll-size, from tea sets to iron cookstoves. Has some good glass, but none of it for sale. One of those. Then, along the road north there’s a tidy little farmer’s wife, barn stuff mostly, woven comforters and moss-rose china et cetera, but cheaper than most. Doing it to send the older girl through beautician’s college.” He stopped, at a snort of amusement from the other end. “Hmm?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just that you can’t sell your specialty either. A pity. You’re so good at it.”

“I know.” He smiled at her. “Don’t hold it against me. And listen now. The lady you want is named Katrina Bogardus—and she is a lady. Gets the early stuff from the big houses when they break up. Has a couple herself. Looks like a little French marquise and is a retired superintendent of schools.”

“Record of sale then, if she’s sold. Or she’ll remember.” Poll’s voice was her business one, to remind him that though not strictly in the trade she knew as well as he the range of its characters from junkyard on—as varied as its stock and as severely appraisable.

“Decidedly.” He hesitated, then warmed to his specialty. “And look, Poll, if you do have time, hit there on a Thursday, when her son-in-law visits. He’s a parson, I guess you’d call him, but you never saw anything like him in America, though he is one—minister, up-Hudson way. Dresses high Anglican and calls her mater—she must have had him re-finished somewhere. Right out of a British movie, the kind they don’t make any more.”

“Barchester Towers,” she said.

“Never saw it.”

“A book.” Her voice risked tenderness again.

He covered this with a rush. “And Poll, if she likes you—which I’m sure she will—she’ll take you upstairs to see the drawing room. Paneled. Moved from somewhere. Lowestoft to match. Your cup of tea, as I’ve heard you say.”

“Pennies to pounds she liked you,” she said. “Well, I might do. And shall I mention your name?”

“Oh, she wouldn’t know it,” he said. “I was just there once. And I don’t buy, you know—when I go up that way.”

“I know,” she said. “You just go—for the fish.”

“Ah, come on now.”

“The way you go almost anywhere,” she said crossly. “Wonder you stay in business.” At once she was contrite, but too nice to say so. “I mean—” She knew he didn’t need money, and why. “Never you mind,” she said quickly. “Go on and do what you like to do, why not. And be grandmother to the rest of us. We can use it, all right, all right…Well, good-by, Guy m’love, and thanks.”

“Good-by, Poll.” There came the final, impossible silence in which he waited for her to hang up, and she didn’t.

“Fancy,” she said, very soft for her. “And you were only there once…Well. See you sometime. Cheerio.”

“Tell you what, Poll,” he said desperately. “On your way up there, why not stop by for—lunch. I’ll gather in some people. Or better still—on your way back, then we can have a gas about it.”

“Right,” she said promptly. “Let you know. Or if not, you drop down here. Oh, no fear, I remember what you said about weekends. For the day. I’ll—gather some people.” One more pause. “Good-by, you bloody old fisherman, you,” she said very rapidly, and rang off.

During his two years in the first-class establishment—its rolling golflands not thirty miles from here—into which relatives and the company had been able to put him on all that money (at a yearly maintaining fee of twice his former salary, and in the company of others similarly able to be as expensively aberrant or agonized) he had been led through the gentle craft world of the sanitarium, toward its own necessary fantasy of the goodness and wholeness entirely residual in the world. In that selective company of Wall Street alcoholics, matrons at the climacteric, schizophrenic young nymphs in riding habit, and highly placed failures of the barbiturate, even the other patients had been extra gentle with him, often—as the doctors were quick to see and use—extra reachable by him.

At first he had been in no condition to notice this. Later on, under the constant encouragement from above to help one another, he hadn’t questioned it. Sitting alongside one of the “Park Avenue” matrons, whose hair had been freshly hyacinthed in the on-grounds salon that morning, he and she had learned how to French-polish furniture; on leaving she had sent him—from an address that wasn’t Park but at another altitude he hadn’t yet been aware of—a box of the books on furniture and china which were still the best he owned. The exquisite young rider—who dressed to the nines at every hour of the day, was mortally afraid of men at less than a yard’s distance, and always had an animal beside her—had been willing to dismount from her horse, leave her Doberman behind, and walk with him—he had taken it to be because as a man he was still so nullified. The flycaster had taught him golf also, and like a legendary rich uncle turned up in a poor young man’s thirties, had opened to him, in the wistful after-dinner talk of a drinker on cure, a whole Barmecide’s feast of bon vivant living; this man, now lapsed between bed and occasional club window, Callendar still visited, and unlike the man’s own nephews, was received. He understood why now of course, long since grown used to that special kindness which in the hospital he had taken for the good manners the rich had been bred to even in their own sickness, awarded even to him who could teach them nothing, not even—as in the one try which had given him a setback—a knowledge of insurance. Only on leaving had he understood what he was to them, to anyone. Against their ills, mostly fugitive from the world, casualties from within, his case had the ghastly health of the man whose coup de grace had come from life itself, from outside. Against his accident, they still had hands to cross themselves. He was their extreme, the triple amputee at the sight of whom even the single-legged may still take heart.

The phone rang.

“Is this the eminent, the resourceful—”

“Hello, Quent.” He prepared to laugh with Quentin Paterno, to join in with the preliminary conversation tic, a stutter of courage rather than larynx, with which his earliest customer-friend always had to start.

“Spoilsport! Now I’ll have to begin all over.” He could hear the little man clear his throat, see the pudge of fist kneading potbelly, the bright brown eyes straining under nobly bald brow.

“Is this the powerful schattchen, goodman extraordinary—?”

“I dunno, Quent. What’s that?”

“Marriage broker, you Christian.” Joke. So was Quentin. “Yop, you did it again, matchmaker. And I suppose you’ll say without even knowing it, like always.”

“Ah, come on now.” Because he thought about people a lot generally, those introduced by him—anywhere from dinner guests, to the fellow who’d had a letter from him to a dealer-correspondent in the Rome where Callendar had never been himself, and had married her—almost always clicked, and sometimes paired off.

“It’s just like any statistics, Quent,” he said. “Nobody remembers the ones that don’t come off.”

“Well, this one did. The party was last night. I suppose they didn’t even call you, those young ingrates.”

“No. But I can’t think who.” He shouldn’t have said that. Quent might take it to mean, who in Quent’s crowd? It was hard to think of them without the italic in which they thought of themselves.

“Cast your mind back, in fact turn back, O Callendar.” No offense given then, except, in that painful laugh at his own joke, by Quent to Quent, who hurried on with the doomed rapidity of a man who had absolute pitch for the way he was sounding. “To a freezing night a nice guy, a Guy, is nice enough to come all the way in to hear my concert. A fall guy, in fact, for anyone his broken-down friends writes a play, paints a pitcher.”

“Quent. Give.” If he was a faithful, even grateful audience, always using the tickets, not just buying them, he’d learned not to dwell on the fact that he was always audience.

“Sorry.” If stopped in time, Quent could tune his delicate pitch to others. Exerted, it at once eased him. “After the concert, Guy. Carnegie Taproom. Remember our kid harpist, Violet? The one the orchestra boys were teasing? ‘Nobody-violates-me Violet,’ they call her. And the couple you bumped into at intermission, they run a shop in an old mill down in Bucks somewhere.”

“New Hope,” he said. “Joe and Milly Pink.” The stuff they sold was terrible.

“They had a son with them, a Princeton boy.”

He barely remembered a boy who sat back, who should have been with the younger crowd. Yes, now. The Princeton boy, day boy probably, scholarship surely, who sat well back from all of them, most of all from his all-wrong parents, the mother in squaw blouse and skirt and no bridgework, the father wearing a huge free-form silver ring of his own design. “Yes, I remember now.” And the shy girl, from Oberlin, Ohio. Farm girl probably, or—if they had them out there—a townie. Who sat back. He had gone over and introduced them.

“Those two,” said Quent. “That boy, that girl.”

“Why, that’s fine!” he said. “They—they should do well together.”

“Yeah, you have a fatality. Or a green thumb. And I have a headache. From the party.”

“Nice of you to call me, anyway,” he said. And waited.

“Matter-of-fact—” Quent said. “I’m in the slough, slow, sloo—of despond. Or how do you pronounce it.”

“I dunno. If that’s what you called me for.” A pause.

“Tell me,” said Quentin. “You heard of people named Benjamin? Must be near neighbors of yours.”

“Two doors down,” said Guy, grinning. “And a half a mile away. Yes, I’ve heard of them. They own the house between us too, but keep it empty. A sort of buffer state between them and a commercial.”

“Not now they don’t. They got the grandmother in it, Phoebe Jasper Aldrich. The Aldrich Chamber Concert Mrs. Aldrich. Library of Congress, and points west. You wouldn’t know.”

“I read the papers.”

“Then you know. They blow a horn in heaven, she hired the hall. Lucky the composer gets to feed at that trough. Trow. Troo. Give her credit, most the good ones do get.”

“Oh?” he said, puzzled. Quent, rich enough by inheritance to own the house in Turtle Bay for which he kept Guy still buying, was too proud-poor in another ever to ask this kind of favor. “No—I’m afraid I don’t know them.”

“Don’t anticipate, guileful Guy. I been asked. A little late in life, it’s true. To make music in that celestial company. This coming weekend.” When the mock accent dropped, then they were near.

He picked it up. “So?” And waited. It came as expected.

“William.”

As usual.

“How?” he said, finally.

“Pills…Oh, he’s all right. Resting quiet. We got to him.”

As usual.

“I knew in my bones last night, when he wouldn’t go with me. Always a sign, when he won’t leave the house. But I felt I had to go. It’s such a bind, you’re not supposed to show worry. Y’know?”

“Mmm.” He knew.

“You have to be tough with them,” said poor Quentin. “Especially when you’re family.”

For this he had no answer. “He wasn’t asked up here?” he said. “To go with you.”

“Oh, nothing personal,” Quentin said quickly. “Nobody gets to bring anybody up there. Not even wives. I told him. But he wouldn’t believe me. You know William.”

“Yes.” Yes, he knew William. A swag of still true-blond hair over the high, narrow cranium of an underfed child—of which William had been one. A mouth set like a cherry pit in the slender jaw. And a nameless talent, or only the desire for one, harbored like a wound. William, barbiturate failure, still only a year away from true boy when first met.

“Yes, I know William.” He had been the patient to whom Guy had tried to teach insurance. “Quent—” If I came down to stay—would he let you go? He already knew the answer, which would be given even now with pride: No. Only me. “No,” he said aloud, “I don’t suppose.”

“Well anyway, that’s really why I called you. To get a line on them. I had some wild idea, maybe she would ask him up. But I can see now how ridiculous.” Quentin expelled a long, relieved sigh.

“No, I don’t know a thing, I’ve never seen them. Except that they have cats.” One was nosing the screen door now.

“Give me that high-class excuse of yours,” Quent said suddenly. “The one you use to beg off weekends with. You know. The one you give us.”

He laughed, and gave it. “I say I like to be alone too much. Then they say ‘Oh, we’ll leave you alone!’ Then I say the simple truth, that I know they will, but I never can hit the right posture for it. I don’t know how to relax into being half-alone but not alone…Mightn’t do for you.”

“Jees, no, you know me. No posture at all. No, it has to be something real.”

“Like what?” he said.

“Claustrophobia, maybe.” Quent was feeling better. “Or what’s that thing on heights?”

“Acrophobia.” It was hard to stay angry with them—if they had to make catastrophe of some small emphatic of life, in the end they always entertained you with their elaboration of it. “But the house is on the riverbank—I know that much. And she’s asking you for the weekend, not burying you.” A second cat was nosing at his door. “Why not ‘Ailurophobe’?” he said. “They must have half a dozen of them. Cats.”

“Cats give William asthma,” Quentin said dreamily. “Gee, whad you do, swallow the manual? I wish I could read. I wish I had your sense of detachment.”

Burn your house down then. Burn William. It was the one thing for which he couldn’t bear to be marveled at—why should they want his priceless capital of non-suffering? He didn’t answer.

“Anyway, thanks, Guy, maybe I’ll do that. Thanks a million. It’s just—I don’t want it to sound phony. You know? And with certain people, outside your own close circle of friends, howya going to know you not giving offense?” Quent’s voice squeaked—a mouse transfixed in terror of its own moves.

“You don’t give it, Quent,” he said. “You never do.”

“Ah, Guy…Anyway. Good to talk to you. Marriage broker is nothing; you could open a whole accommodation agency. But not till you help us finish on the house, hah?”

That house would never be finished—how could they afford to finish this construct that formally provided them with everyone else’s troubles—and pleasures of course—from maid trouble to gourmet shopping, to spats over the discipline of the curly-headed dog-child? He didn’t say this either.

“Anyway, good-by now,” said Quent. “And William always asks for you. I’ll give your love to William.”

“Yes, do that.”

“And good to talk to you. I’ll be honest with you, that’s why I called.” Quent’s repetitions were more for his own ear than for others—it was the way he knew he meant something. “Thanks again,” he said. “You don’t know what it means to me, to be able to talk to another normal person.”

He put down the phone. Phone calls often made him think of lantern slides, the kind even the high schools probably didn’t use anymore, and views of life, not Borneo. Any housewife might go through a box of them heavy enough to make her hand tremble, any morning. He took up the lamp again.

In the past seven years, he had fulfilled all the fine dreams the hospital had had for him, meanwhile never hiding from himself that these might be limited dreams. It was only now and then that the old fire lit in his head—or the dream of a new one to which he would get there on time. Life, though so much more gently, had still come to him by accident. It had been on his first fishing trip alone, driving back on the Vermont side, that his attention had been caught by a farmhouse flying two flags, British and American, and idly inquiring down the road where he’d stopped to refuel at a gas pump in front of a china-stuffed façade and further sheds receding, had been given the whole of that rum-running story. He had knelt to look at, not buy, an old lamp of a kind he hadn’t seen since and now knew to be as rare as pemmican—and had been given the history of such lamps. History, he found, could be picked like daisies all along the roadside, if one were willing to take it a little squeegee—what had fascinated him from the first was the squeegee—the narrators themselves. And in the end, just like them, he’d acquired a business, and one just like theirs, “on the side.”

For not a man jack of them (or a woman in that gallery of whittled women) who hadn’t been beached up on his wrack of metal and porcelain from somewhere other. Or if not, then whatever in them had settled early or late for this flotsam had done so in lieu of something else. It hadn’t been until much later, of course, that he saw this clearly, and much more: how even in winter or bad times the hunt had to go on, if need be, with each other; how in the end the rooker had to be rooked. How each, drily scanning “the trade,” saw this as well as anybody, but denied it for himself. And how each, like himself, had arrived at the specialty which made his game worthy and the others’ silly—and which he would not exchange. Sometimes, one came upon an antiquer whose wares, invading his house, had coiled into closet and bed and pushed out the humans entirely, leaving him wedged in its clockwork like a single, bright, movable eye. In his own case, the reverse having happened, he’d been helpfully pushed out of the house altogether, where he was kept tethered like a buoy in a tide, perhaps, but still in the world’s tide.

His own specialty was necessarily invisible. But if he could have stood people up in rows—like Romanies with their hands out, who were in turn his soothsayers—the shop would have been filled with them, and his best customer was always himself. He supposed they were his substitute for history—whose?—as history itself had always seemed to him in a way a substitute. In the hospital, in his last phase but one, which he had taken to be religious, he had done a great deal of such reading, only to find out that, like so many of his era, he had merely been lonely to hear about other eras, especially of that pure time when people made their own constructs of God. And in the final months of his cure, he came to understand what the dead were—at least, his dead. The dead did not own history, as he had once supposed; they only could not move forward into it, being fixed in what they had. In the worst of his sickness, he had wilfully refused to move on without them—he would stand with them. He was mad with jealousy for them and against himself—for all they would never know. He hated himself for having to grow forward into it. In the end he had been able to, to leave the hospital—and them. Sheer luck had then nudged him into a modus vivendi whose limits were so exactly modulated to his own—one exactly useful to a man able to move on, unable to forgive himself for it.

He had come to this place not long after, on a day’s trip to the impeccably kind lawyer who had all that time held in trust for him his now more modest good fortune. Even the barn, a mile or so uproad, had been so forbearing with him, so high and mild, with autumn riverwind coming in at its windows just a cast too weedy—so willing to wait. Even the real estate agent might have known of his mishap, unless he spoke to all clients as if only his properties could heal. In geography, of manners as well as hills, this was still that formal countryside of the hospital he had just come from, where wealth, and perhaps goodness, too, were sometimes still ecclesiast. To the north of him, one great estate had humbled itself to Capuchin, hard by another, to be sure, that had gone more militantly, to golf course. Down below him, rectors in board-and-batten snuggeries presided over the lesser manses, alongside here and there the heart-piercing needle of a still New England church. Sports cars knitted amicably as petunias between all of them. A safe visual goodness still ringed him. Everything was in repair. And—as he had the perspective to say laughingly—the opportunities for picking up church candlesticks were endless.

He had good perspective. Down still lower in the town, in certain side streets that had once been “native,” or more often now in the supermarket for new cottagers of the class just below commuter, he sometimes saw a Saturday family he recognized. They had come from the north. The young man, one infant on shoulder, was beset by two other jumpers demanding to be taken to the Mi-Dream Ice-cream. The woman, the Ellen, was still pretty in her postpartum fat and had been to Mamie’s Beauty Den; she would not comb the curls out until morning. She was a girl who would name her eldest “Chester,” against all lost eighteenth-century New England, because it “went with”—who would name her infant daughter Coral. She was a stranger, an utter stranger. The young man, given the privilege of naming his second child, had called it Constance, but only out of a simpler maleness, or perhaps, though he was unaware of it, because fidelity was going to be so important to him. They both were blind to him, Guy Callendar, as he was now. She was ensconced in her family, never to look at another man, never at one like him. Perhaps the young man, not necessarily smarter than she, only properly keener by way of army, business college, and business, had paid him a look, as to an example of what he himself might someday aspire to: this lean, older man who so resembled him, who still had his hair, his own long, pleasant enough Connecticut face, inside a style of dress and haircut already noted down at conventions—this older man who, in ten years and with a little of the right kind of luck, might be him. Both the couple were oblivious to his own—snobbery. The children were smartest of all; children always sense fear. For though in the book of phobia he had a clean slate, even to fire, he could not sit through any movie or story in which a child was mistreated or in peril—and this was not in the book. The children knew he preferred not to look at them at all but could not help looking. Like animals they sensed their mastery over him and often acknowledged it in some gawky mince or persistent turning back that bewildered their parents. It was in his face perhaps, what he feared for them—even the infant often gave him a patient, peach-cheeked smile.

He never saw them, that family, as any older; they stayed where they were. He was the one who had moved on. To the degree that he had, he could bear it now. Perspective was what any man carried on his back, not a cross, but an easel to which pictures were supplied slowly, always from an unknown hand. He merely knew better than most what had happened to him. The hospital had taught him not to expect that the world would continue to recall his extremity and pity it, had warned him that he must not either, and they had been right. What more had come, they couldn’t have anticipated. The heart educates, and unlike the State, is no leveler. Some men tragedy flattens farther back in their grooves. Others it pushes altogether out of their sphere.

The lamp was finished. His hand went to the phone, then withdrew. Instead, he chose a shade of plain old white glass from his stock of them, set it upside down in a carton, placed it and the brass lamp, electrified and polished now, on the floor of his station wagon, and drove off. On Mondays, the inn’s bar and restaurant, like his shop, was closed, the chef and assistant barman off; the rare guest in one of the rooms upstairs must take his chances elsewhere. Sligo and Marion always spent the day at home in retirement; any business that took them away was performed midweek. No doubt they could only feel private on the one day the place wasn’t convivial. Publicans had little time or will for private friends. If they welcomed him there, as they did now and then on that day, it was more or less because it was his Monday also, and he understood the special coziness taken and given when the shopkeeper entertains others, particularly others of the same, on the day the door is closed. He went there, he supposed, because they were in the same pocket as himself. If he never thought of those two as enjoying their place in nerve and spirit, as he did his, of ever really doing more than accepting it, it was perhaps because to think of them, or of knowing them, in terms of nerve and spirit, was in itself an oddity; they were not that sort.

Good barkeeps, or “your host” as the menus said nowadays, generally kept themselves unknowable. Sligo was a good one. A big, very pale man, both tall and wide, shown ambiguously only to the waist as he stood between the dark mirrors and mahogany of a bar dating from the Spanish-American War, he might have been a mercenary seen through the spyglass of a much earlier war, or perhaps a footman of the size and impassivity then so prized. He had a blacksmith’s arm girth, ending in the bartender’s pouchily delicate hands. In his silence, he might have been the smith’s spreading tree. From his wide gaze, customers assumed that he listened. Rumor said that he drank, or (because he accepted no offers to) once had—but this was always said of men in his profession. Some said that the horse brasses on the wall behind him came from Sligos, who for centuries had been innkeepers in Britain. Others pooh-poohed this because of the name and favored the Abbey Theatre, the wives particularly. His black hair curled low and caddish—or Roman—at the neck; both were thick. Such a figure, so aristocratically pale, must have come from somewhere; the odds were that it had come down.

When the restaurant itself was full, it was Sligo’s habit to leave the bar and make a circuit of the tables, inclining his head to each with a query so regally inaudible that only weeks of custom confirmed what he had said to be no more than “’S everything all right?” Seen at a distance, above the tables, Sligo’s profile was suddenly neat, set in his jowled head like one of those cameos purposely carved only half emerged from the matrix, not cut free of it. Weight was the one sign that this great trunk might indeed be hollow enough to have a once much smaller man inside it. At the moment he stepped down from the bar, wholly in the clear, one saw with surprise, beneath the white coat which hid width but no belly, that his legs, long as they were, were bowed. As for Marion, who sometimes tended bar in these interims, at first glance she was merely the good host’s wife.

At a break in the hedgerow to the left of the highway, Callendar turned in—there was no sign—drove riverwards for perhaps a quarter of a mile, parked in the big courtyard behind the house, empty now except for the owners’ car, and waited tactfully for one or the other to come out, as per custom, at the sound of his tires on the gravel. On Mondays, to get their quiet, they disconnected the phone. He wasn’t one to drop in on a couple on their equivalent of Sunday—he remembered how it could be. Once in a great while, Marion called him the same day to ask him over; more usually the invitation was an offhand “Drop in” or “We’ll expect you” that same week. Today he was expected, with the lamp. Sometimes it took her quite a while to come from some upstairs region from which Sligo would come down later—it was almost always she. And once or twice, when expected, no one had come out to greet him. He’d the sense not to knock or go in, and he’d been right. Neither of them had ever referred to it after.

Unlike his own place, this one had a straight view. The Canal Zone Inn, as it still was known, was set in the crotch of a promontory that fingered the river, really only a slice of made land just strong enough to hold a concrete pier, no trees. Behind the sandstone house, of the squat Dutch sort that never looks its size, there was backdrop enough of them. The courtyard was good for fifty cars. Nobody except the occasional tourist who bumbled here ever walked out on the little plage of false land, either to sit at its umbrellaed tables, or bathe from its fringe of beach. From it, it was said, one could see clear down to the Point—West Point. The inn’s late owner, not from the Academy, though military enough to have seen war service in “ninety-eight,” had probably acquired most of his rank and all of his legend when well out of the war, and in his last years also, a character. The legend (of cadets sneaking across river and so forth) the Sligos had kept or let stay, even to the large, gold-pronged diamond solitaire in its glass showcase on the bar-top, according to its shaky Spenserian label: “Ring worn by Colonel George when he helped carry the message to Garcia.” Customers who had known the old “Colonel” reported that even in his nonage he had been nimble enough in mind to have carried the news from Ghent to Aix, had he ever heard of that circumstance. Nowadays, and not merely because of time passing, there were almost no such customers. In place of the former character of the inn—speakeasy in the Twenties, dirty ladies upstairs in the Thirties, dirty old men downstairs in the Forties—the Sligos had painstakingly substituted their own. This was no longer new enough to be shadowy, or shouldn’t have been—like Callendar, they too had been here seven years. Or perhaps the inn’s intended character was to make them seem shadows of it.

He himself wouldn’t have painted the mellow old stone with white, cleanly as it now looked, pleasingly cleft at precise intervals, even on the overhanging second story, with boxes of geranium, all of the same superior pink. The place now looked reassuringly as much as possible like others of its kind, with their same suggestion that setting was only for status, that the real shelter one got here provided the customary satisfactions—and above all, was inside. But the Sligos must know their business, for they had got plenty of it—still uncompromisingly local, if not the same. “Before we came,” he’d heard Marion say, “the bar had one television, one spider hanging down in front of it—and often only one customer.” If she knew that this might well have been one or another of the older residents, people like the Benjamins or their attendant cronies, who now never came here, she made no mention of it. Now, with no television or spiders, the trade came from the former trade’s expensively subdivided land, from people well above cottager, often new country club, who needed to love the local tradition, and were prepared to do so in a hurry. Inside, in the games room on the lower level, darts could be played, or—as a visiting Englishman had once exclaimed at—shove ha’penny, played with half-dollars. (Drinks brought from above were likely to cost twice that, and to be martinis.) Nobody except that visitor—and Guy—was likely to wonder from which of the Sligos’ backgrounds this idea had come, or whether it went with anybody else’s here. Like the decor, some of it from Guy’s shop, the idea was “Colonial.” A specialty, like seventy kinds of ice cream, or pizza, had been provided. The rooms above were purposely empty, overnight trade discouraged. Patronage came mostly in pairs here, but not that kind. Even the hosts, shadowy as they kept themselves, were seen to be a pair.

Inside, since Marion was the talker of the two, it took time to notice how noncommittal she remained. Tending bar, when not busy she usually sat on a stool behind the glass case with the Colonel’s ring in it, down at one end. The case was small and low enough for her to lean chin on hand and look down into it, if she chose. Guy, in his mild bouts of company, often sat on the last stool at that end; company at one elbow was enough. From the first, he’d seen how useful the case and its contents were. New customers always asked about it; old ones invariably made some reference to it of an evening. The big diamond, high on its gold prongs, couldn’t be touched, but its gleam could always be rubbed up into a conversation. “My God, that’s a convincing fake!” a man would say. “Have to look at it twice to know it isn’t real.” Marion would nod, not looking down on it. “Real, they couldn’t leave it here,” said another. This time she might look down on it, or smile, or raise an eyebrow—oh, there were all sorts of variants, on both sides.

“Screw the diamond!” he’d heard a woman say to her husband on one particular evening. “It’s a cinch the old guy was a fake. Chrissake, when was the message to Garcia.”

Whenever the talk turned to the Colonel’s card, and thence outward from the bar to the world and history, Marion usually deserted it. She was there, however, when the woman’s husband, standing behind her chair next to Guy’s, introduced himself as the manager of the new jewelry store downtown, and suddenly took out an eyepiece. “Still think of musself as a practicing jeweler,” he said, looking round him. “And proud of it. Want that stone appraised, do it gladly. Gladly. Looks to me from here that’s no zircon.” He popped in the loupe. “Can’t see for sure through that glass. Lemme see now, howzis case open.” For the first time, Marion’s nod was more negative than—not. Her hand even stayed him. “Don’t let those black spots fool you,” he said genially. “Just carbon. A mine diamond that many carats could still be—” Marion was called away to the other end of the bar, and stayed there for some time. He shrugged, put the loupe back in a pocket, and said to Guy, undertone, “Be surprised how many people have an old-fashioned piece like that, don’t really want to know if it has value.” When Marion came back, he addressed her. “Any time your husband want to buy a modern stone for that pretty little hand, you two come down and see me personally. We merchants stand together, hmm?”

Sligo, tray in hand, was just behind them, up to fill a bar order for one of the tables. “Oh Elwood!” the jeweler’s wife said quickly, smiling at Marion. Women liked Marion, who always took care of them with a kind of bar delicacy reserved for them. “I think old things are fascinating. That box doesn’t look as if it’s been opened since the day he put it there—no wonder she wouldn’t want it opened. Why even the air in it would be the same as that day!” Marion looked down at her own hand, at her thin, pewter-colored wedding band.

“Women,” said the jeweler. “She must have seen every gee dee holy relic in Italy, kissed ’em too if I’d let her, dirt and all. Yop, we just back from the tour.” He appraised Sligo. “You folks…you…in the faith, aren’t you?” Again he spoke in an undertone. Sligo, taking the drinks Marion handed him across the bar, bent his grandee stare on him, but left without answering. “No offense, I’m sure,” said the jeweler to anybody handy.

“Cawnvert,” the woman whispered to Marion. “Turned for me. We’re both each other’s second. And you know, sometimes—” Marion served them sympathetically, but never took confidences from them. She was a good bartender though. The house quickly stood everybody a drink.

There was nothing of the barmaid about Marion; in her blouse and skirt, with a sweater for nippy evenings, she might have been anybody from around here. On weekends, when the trade slid in on their way to or from dressier places, she sometimes wore one of those matched cardigan and skirt sets which the estate people had once set the fashion for but now meant nothing—even the maids here, copying their mistresses, wore cashmere. He had a theory about that, about Marion. With her short-featured face, trim bones and easily cropped hair, she probably wore clothes of any kind well, giving no sense of touting them. Not tall, because of good proportion, she looked sometimes taller than she was, or smaller. It took a second glance to see that she was middle-sized and slender, well compacted by use—she worked hard—and had looks above the average, though past their prime. In any woman’s face there came a turning point after which, once passed, there was no going back, and Marion’s, in its mid-thirties, had passed it. Under the eyes it had two scimitars of flesh, or in a softer light, of shadow, which put a curious mask there. One could almost see a young, unformed girlish face there, and, superimposed on it the blunter scope of the features as they were now, but never the face as it must have been in its prime. Her voice always surprised him, half because he recognized it, though no one else here seemed to notice. It was that high, rather small voice, babyish but not whiny, not lisping but almost r-less, singsong without being really melodious, which was sometimes “finished” at certain schools but really began earlier—in the never having to speak too loud, from nanny-time on, for service. If the estate people had ever come here, surely they would have been startled by it—one of theirs. And here was his theory—that Marion had once been in service of that kind. It was in the way she tended the women, one of them but still not one of them, in the almost hungry way, as they left the place, her glance looked after them, from her distance. At first he had thought it merely the natural enough envy of the publican’s wife, jealous of their freer household time. But it was in the way also in which she and Sligo were joined (rarely speaking to each other in public or private—if the Mondays he saw were private), not even in sympathy perhaps, but in some one of the wretcheder forms of closeness often to be found in marriage-cellars. For, if they shared something no one was to know and neither spoke of it, the two of them in their way would be as close as many couples who spoke. There were things that joined people far more often than love; one saw or talked to such every day—as he had not an hour ago—people in cahoots over something far less dramatic than hate or murder, some burden that together they had climbed out of, or with. Yes, he was almost sure of it. Sligo had come down in the world; Marion had come up in it. This could well have made them the pair they were.

It was even in the way he himself had gravitated to them, not knowing precisely at the invitation of which of them, but knowing that he was in some way welcome to both. For him this was relaxing in its turn. They never examined his life in the way of his other friends, and they never asked questions, having instead an air of assuming that any person with any sort of life to him had ghosts also. Or even that all three of them had the kind of life where there were no questions anymore. They included him there, he felt, though perhaps not on their scale. No questions any more—this was what the two of them had in common really, whether it was in some monstrous central arrangement, or only in the collection of bits and pieces and talismans that come from running an inn—like their glass case.

It must have been shortly after that night, almost four years ago, that he’d begun coming here now and then like today—not as a customer. That night, the jeweler’s wife, after insisting on another round of drinks, had become maudlin and her husband had taken her home. Since then, the wife was sometimes seen in the Canal Zone with a woman crony, but not the husband. As the pair left that evening, Marion, watching them go, had looked speculative, as if she already knew this outcome. The hour was later than Guy usually stayed. He had never before been alone at the bar. As the door closed on the couple, Marion’s chin declined on her hand. Her black hair cast a further shadow on the bowfront of the box that held the Colonel. She looked up at Guy and smiled slightly, as if her speculations had included him. “Mr. Callendar.” It wasn’t a question. “How come you never talk about the diamond.”

Today, it seemed they weren’t going to be at home to him. He started up the engine. It wasn’t until he had done so that he became aware of the other sound, jumped into relief against it—a faint “plock,” then an interval, then another “plock.” Somebody was playing at darts on the large board that covered one wall of the downstairs games room and hadn’t heard the car approach, even with the room’s door ajar, as he now saw it was. Even with the large darts that Sligo had had custom-made, it was remarkable how the sound of the play carried—“plock,” and yet another “plock.” But anyone who lived on the great maw of the river grew used to its tricks of voices fanning or swallowed, small reports of insects an inch from the eardrum mistaken for backfire on the opposite shore. He turned off the ignition again, slammed the car door, and, smiling to himself, carried the carton with the lamp across the gravel and up the two old grinding stones that served as steps. More likely, Sligo, who had a passion for the games-of-skill he was so good at, and had stocked the room with every known apparatus for them, had found yet another one at which Guy could be trounced.

Just inside the door he set the carton down on a polished floor painted with guidelines like a gymnasium’s, and stood up, a smile on his face for the player standing motionless in the afternoon shadow, on the mat at the farther end of the room. It was Sligo, poised one foot forward, silent and huge as a plaster cast met at a corridor’s end in a museum, pupils as blind, one arm extended, bent at elbow, as if to shake hands with him down the length of the room. On the upturned palm there was a sliver of silver. He had time only to see that Sligo wore a kind of lederhosen whose leathern front came up high, like a scissor-grinder’s apron, or was slung about him like a multiple holster, then the arm trembled, only trembled as the sliver left it—plock—and the hand retracted slowly, two fingers aloft, thumb across palm. His own head, following the flight, swiveled left, toward the nearer dartboard wall. At first he could not take in what he saw there. A painted bull’s-eye normally there had been blanked out by a wooden target-frame just high and narrow enough to receive the shining knives that outlined a figure tensed within them.

It was Marion, flattened to silhouette but still untouched, the crown of her head held high, her eyes and mouth open, her arms raised from her sides like a prim Joan. In the wooden space between each hand and thigh a knife was imbedded. Her eyes tremored, holding him. “’On’t move,” said the rigid hole of her mouth, “’on’t move. He only has two more.” There were still two vacant spaces in the outline of hafts that enclosed her, one each to the left and right of her neck, between shoulder top and ear. He felt he dared not move his own head; even his eyes must hold their allegiance. Plock. On the left side—safe. Come again, quickly. He prayed for it. He should have lunged for her in the interval. But her eyes held him, saying No. Unbearable, not to know what those eyes saw coming behind him. Make it in these shoulder blades, mine, he said to it. Not in those eyes. He saw them close, slump—in the second before. Plock. On the right. Safe. He reached her.

When he gripped her arms, she had already raised herself and stepped away from the target, already able to stand alone. She spoke over his shoulder, in a dead voice that told him much. “Better help me with him now, will you. He’s about to fall.”

Sligo was standing as before, his empty right hand raised in hoc signo, motionless except for the sweat stealing down him everywhere. Only the sweat, patched under his armpit, banded across his forehead, held him up; the hand glistened with it. When he began to topple, his body seemed to lean from the forehead, eyes closed. His boots held him to the floor until they got to him. Once, in their gasping struggle to ease him into a chair, he several times muttered what Callendar heard as “Forty low. Forty low.” Holding him around the waist, they maneuvered his hips into the heavy captain’s chair. Sligo’s hand, braced on the low table in front of it, slid forward on the slick maple, his head cracked upon it, and he rested there jackbent, head on arm. As they stood over him, getting their wind back, their arms hanging, they heard his deep intake, steady as a man in a coma, reassuring as the breath of the dying, calmer than their own.

“I never thought of it,” said Guy. “I didn’t know. Because there was never anything to—But that dead-white color. I should have known.” It was a slapstick notion, that one of the veined cheek, the carbuncled nose. Those were the genial ones, the harmless ones.

“No one does. How should you?” she said. “He doesn’t do it like anyone else. He never even smells of it.”

They were both backing away from him with sneaking step, as from a sickbed.

“The worst ones don’t.” He knew them from the hospital, not the red ones, here and gone tomorrow, but the white-faced ones, with self-murder like a thirsty knifehole between the eyes.

“I never knew any but him,” she said. Her voice was prim but echoing, the voice of a woman who says, “I have lived all my life in this town.”

“Periodic…is he?” He couldn’t help the phrase, like a doctor’s. There were only so many to use.

“Yes.” Her teeth began to chatter. “Once a week.”

He got her a chair, leapt about looking for a wrap for her, expostulating with himself. “Let me get you a—” He looked down at her. They both grimaced at the absurdity of it. She nodded. “I’ll get us both one,” he said.

When he came downstairs from the bar with the whiskies, she had found a sweater for herself and had cowled a thick raincoat over Sligo. He lingered on the stairs for a minute, staring down with a grinding distaste. Upstairs, the late sun was buttering all that cheap brass with a commercial cheer. No, it was impossible; they couldn’t leave him here.

They sat sipping the whisky. He was sure she felt the same uneasy sense of conniving. Because they had always been three, and still were, they spoke in sickroom voices.

“What was he saying there?” He glanced at Sligo, including him. “Forty something. Forty throw?” He glanced at the target-frame, and away.

She leaned on her clasped hands, her glass put aside. “His weight. He’s been ashamed of it ever since—” She cleared her throat. “In recent years.” The little cough made the phrase sound like an obit. “Actually—actually, he must be fifty pounds more than that by now. But when he’s this way, he always says it. ‘Fourteen stone.’”

He nodded, as if this was always the way men reckoned weight in America. Then there was silence. Some people’s diffidence was helped by it, not hers. She was helpless against the years of her own silence. He felt that she was not to be left with it.

“Nobody else knows?” It struck him that he wouldn’t be much help to her if he kept to questions to which he already had the answers.

She shook her head. After a while, she said: “Maybe both of us were—” She grimaced at him, lowering her face in the coyness of agony. “Hoping you knew.”

“Audience?” he said.

Now the silence was his.

“Can you—speak for both?” he said. “Are you that much a pair?”

“Yes, why not?” she said. Then her face slipped into her hands; she must be exhausted, might want to lie down. He no longer knew anything about the energy of women. Though outside it was August, it was already autumn in this basement, in this summer-kitchen of yore. In that light, dappled from above, the polished racks and mallets and wickets, sets of balls, nets and checkerboards, hung as in an armor room, above the yellow, black, and green stripings on the modern, balsa-colored floor. Games looked ghostly when left to themselves, whether for an hour or a century. When she took her hands from her face, there were no tears on it in the place for them, only those crescents of flesh. “Why not? We suffer the same.”

He saw into that tiny, stifling pit. Must he envy it?

She got up from her chair then, and strode away from him. “One gets on better without talking. Pity is fatal.” At the target-frame, she knelt to a long, slender box at its base. “You won’t be coming back now. Better that you stop coming.” Box in hand, she stood up, her back to him, musing over it as people do who recover a memory, good or bad. “I didn’t even know he had these around any more. He tricked me into standing here. After all these years with it, I’m still not very bright.”

“Where did he ever get things like that, learn them? A circus?”

“Sligo?” She was staring at the wooden backboard. “By inheritance, you might say. He had a ve-ry rich…sporting inheritance, I’m told—at one time. Polo, fencing—though I never saw him at those. Guns.” For the first time, she switched about to look at the man hunched there. Then she turned back to the target and began drawing the knives from it, one by one.

He came up and watched, over her shoulder. All haft or all blade, the knives had the elegance of any such balance. The chest she was fitting them into was lined with purple velvet. “Marion? Talk, then. Since I’m not coming back.”

“What do you want to know?” She was intent on the shaft in her hand.

“I’m not sure. How can I be?”

“Ask.” Her whisper went into the box, with the knife. “I don’t know where to—how to. Ask!”

Another knife went into the box before either of them spoke.

“Why does he drink?”

“He always has.”

“Why do you stay?”

“He has no one—no, that’s not true. I left once. I even worked in—it doesn’t matter. Twelve years ago. We’d been married five. Then his landlady called—he had the dt’s. He had no one.” She held a blade over the box. “Neither did I.”

He watched the blade go in. “Is he often like this?”

“Comes and goes. Sometimes—more than a month goes by.” Her voice lightened to that.

All the knives were housed now except the six that had ringed her head, a zodiac sign filled with darkness.

“He will kill you.”

“Never has yet.”

He was silenced.

“Sorry. I meant—he doesn’t really want to. Or somewhere in between.”

He shivered. “Maybe you like it.”

“Maybe, once.”

“Not now?”

It came slowly. “Not now.”

She turned. “Once I wanted him to kill me, but that was only at first—Odd, isn’t it. Ought to be the other way round.” Quickly she dropped her eyes, and knelt to set the box, heavy now, on the floor, straightening its double row of hafts. “Twenty-four,” she said, and closed it. “You see—” she said, before she stood up again. There was something secretive about her face again, if not sullen—the cast of a struggle that could be as much against honesty as toward it. “I—used to be fond.”

He bent and lifted the box. “They’re heavy. Heavy as silver. Maybe Damascene.”

“Could be.”

“Better let me take them along with me.”

“Why?”

“Why!”

She answered him with a half-shrugged wave of the hand. He saw why, of course. The sun, now sinking outside, had reached even here, dappling on mallet and rope, on quoit and bow and all other implements for game, as outside it must be touching, one by one for tomorrow’s life, the trees.

“I don’t like to take away any of it. He hasn’t very much of his—of those years. Before he knew me. I don’t like to—seem against him.”

He stared at her.

“Don’t you see? He did me an injury. Long ago. And he can’t forget it. Forgive.”

“So you have to let him keep on—trying.”

“No. It was nothing physical. Not really. Not with those. He—” Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh—what does it matter? He married me under a false name.” She made an odd, stretching grimace with her lips, like a child released from medicine. “No worse than what I did to him.”

She swayed then, and he would have shut up—but she held her hand out, for the box.

“But don’t you want anything else!” he cried. He heard it echo. “You could leave. Again.” All the unaskable questions—to her, to anyone, tumbled out at once. “Can’t you pity yourself!”

“I can, I do,” she said. “But not without Sligo.”

They exchanged a glance conjoined but unseeing, the mutual hold of two people in their separate ways looking back.

“Don’t come again.” Her voice was harsh. “I can’t afford the perspective.”

For help, he turned to the man sleeping there. It was said that sleepers remembered what was said while they slept, poison or balm in the ear. He wondered. In the hospital he had seen nurses speaking for hours on end to catatonics, who it was said registered everything, and if their lips ever broke open again, would recall. No one could lie there as Sligo was, except in stupor, the head sideways on the arm now, position otherwise unchanged. He could think of nothing to tell that ear. “Hadn’t I better help you get him to bed?”

“He gets up himself. After a while.”

“Will he remember?”

“Not always. Not—for a while.”

“Not until Mondays?” He slapped the box.

She held out her arms, hands cupped. Quite suddenly, he laid the box along them, and strode to the door. At his name, he stopped.

“You’re welcome,” he said, without turning.

“Guy—”

She was holding the box clasped to her as if it were an infant, or two dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses. “Is it sick of me? That I stay.”

Hair prickled on his nape. Questions on leaving were so often for the leaver as well. He heard an answer, long ago inserted in his own ear. “Without help—” He choked on it. “Surely—? But why do you ask me?”

She bent her head.

The door behind him was stuck with dampness. He kicked it open. No sun came with it. “Without help,” he said again, half to himself, hand on knob. “I’ll come Mondays.”

When he got home, he began rustling up his usual meal for these nights, a cold evening supper anybody might have on his day of rest. During the week he was a fair enough straight cook, though he had never been able to become one of those over-interested bachelors. There were a number of other things he hadn’t been able to become, again or newly, but these did not intrude on him now. His mind was the merciful blank that warded off the black infections of others. Later on, when properly immunized, he might safely ponder those, but not now. As he banged the refrigerator door open and closed, crackled butcher’s paper and clinked dishes on a tray, taking comfort in all this domestic voodoo, he kept hearing a cat mewing at the small window which gave directly from bathroom shelf to high grass bank outside. He went to open it. The cat stepped in daintily among his toilet things, then drew itself up with the wariness of all cats that are helped. It was one he’d never seen before, a Siamese with the brown and buff markings called “points,” and the clenched head of its breed—like a child’s fist holding up eyes. At the sight of it, he could hear his mother, all her life a yearner for more than Hartford calicoes, sigh in her grave. This one would not be fed, but circled the house, calling, and after a minute he put it out again, through the same window. He himself preferred dogs.

When he had brought his tray to the screened porch—“terrace” the builder had called it—where he had all his meals summers, he heard the cat again, nosing at the screen and retreating somewhere into the dusk outside. He got up with a sigh of his own, fetched a dish of milk and set it outside, then sat down to his meal, on a low settle he’d placed to face the grove of trees that hid the river, holding the tray on his knees. Above the grove, the sky was still full of western light. After a moment, a cat came to feed, but not the first one—a black tom he’d fed once or twice before. Shortly, a high, silvery voice, young girl or young woman, wended here and there through the grove. “Here, kitty-kitty, here, Max. Ma-ax.” The tom lifted its head, then bounded off, in the opposite direction. This drama too had occurred before. The voice, still calling, after a while always blended away. He’d never decided whether or not the cat was Max.

He was still eating when a girl in a bathing suit stepped into the clearing and came toward him, head bent. Halfway, she stopped, facing the trees, put both hands to her mouth as if she were blowing on a conch and said faintly, “Max?” Circling the barn, not calling again, she came round to the screen door, hands locked behind her, head still bent, saw the dish and gave a start of surprise, saw him, and palms at her chest, gave another. He smiled tentatively at her, not sure whether she could see this through the screen at this hour, but did not rise. The heavy tray held him indolent now. The thin figure, dim in its faded robin’s-egg suit, barefoot, was close to a child’s. And it was his porch, his clearing, hidden without sign or path, where even in daytime he was almost never surprised.

“Excuse me,” the girl said, “but you don’t have a cat, do you.”

“Well, no, I don’t. But I’ve been feeding somebody’s.”

“Oh.” She seemed to peer in at him. “A black one? Oh, that’s ours,” she said, before he had a chance to nod.

“Oh, is he. I wondered. He always seems to run the other way.”

She giggled. About fourteen, he’d say, with those pointed little breasts that couldn’t be counterfeited, nor the way her hands latticed at them. “Oh, he’s just one I found. He’s been giving the others the worst habits. But the rest are really ours.”

“Are they.” He couldn’t help his stiffness toward those who were too casual to the young of any breed, even when they were themselves the young of another. “There did seem to be several, and there didn’t seem to be anybody—”

“My p—my people are away, you see.” The manner was suddenly elegant, the voice theirs from five to fifty, kin to the one he’d left only an hour ago. “Which ones have you seen?”

The tray felt heavy on his knees, too awkward somehow to rise. He judged her after all about twenty. “There was a Siamese here, just a few minutes ago.”

“Itty-Katty!” She clutched her brow. “Oh God and criminy, that’s my mother’s, she’ll be frantic.”

“And a striped one, yesterday.”

“Fatty-Kitty! I haven’t seen her for two days. Oh dear, will I catch it. They’re not allowed in the house, you see. Because we’ve been staying at Gran’s.”

More likely twelve. She was small in size, and he hadn’t been around children. Possibly even ten. “We could go hunt up Itty, er, Kitty,” he said. “I don’t think the other one’s been around today. That is, Fatty, er, Katty. The striped.”

“Got you!” she said, clapping her hands.

“I beg your—”

“Itty-Kat. Fatty-Kit. Oh it drives everyone wild. Scat-rhythm, to coin a pun—as my father says. Makes you say it on the downbeat, you see. The other would just be Dixieland.” She peered in on him, as if at another world she expected to see there. “Jazz. We all pretend to be fanatic on the subject. To annoy Gran.” Her voice was suddenly shy.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Is any one of those creatures named Max?”

“Why, that’s the one you’ve been feeding!” she said. “The lost one.”

“Oh, the lost one.” He looked down at the dish. “Good old Max.”

She giggled. “That’s what my kid cousin said. Bill, he’s a senior at Stanford. He was here till today, but he had to go back early.”

Good old Bill. Eighteen? He gave up. It was the gloaming hour, just before all cats became gray.

“Oh, don’t get up,” she said. “You finish your meal, fevvens sake. And don’t think of helping hunt—that’s my responsibility. I was going to ask you a favor, but not that one. If it wouldn’t be too much of a drag. Oh gee—well, thanks.” As she came through the door, she looked up at him. All he could be sure of was that she wasn’t ten. “I guess I ought to introduce myself, hadn’t I, I’m Alden Benjamin, we live just down the road.” She recited this rapidly.

“Oh, how do you do, I’m G—”

“Oh I know who you are, of course.” She refused a chair and sat on the floor, clasping her knees. “You’re Mr. Callendar. Gwee Callendar.” This last came very softly, as if it were being tried out for the first time. “The tenant,” she said.

“Ten—? Oh.” He glanced up at his own eaves, the fine old triangulated ones, deep enough for swallows to nest in, on whose rescue he had rubbed his knuckles bare.

She giggled. “Oh, I know. Not really, any more. But it’s always been called that, kind of, ever since the land grant—it was one, you know. Some revolutionary jerk, way back. And it’s marked that way on the map that went with it—‘tenant’s land.’” She gave a small, convulsive smile. “They still like to think…you know how p—” She coughed. “—people are.”

“Oh.” He drew out a cigarette. “Your—people.”

She nodded. “Parker and Buzzie.”

“Cigarette?”

She lit the filter end. He gave her another. She addressed the trembling end of it, deeply. “It’s just, you know, I smoke these plain fags.”

He stood up again. “Just about to get myself another beer. Would you—?”

“Oh, no thanks, I mean, I do, but no thanks.”

He brought back a Coke and a plate of store cookies, the filled kind.

She ate one. “Peanut butter! God. Haven’t tasted it since I was six.”

“Your—people,” he said. “They’re—your parents?”

“Oh dear.” She sat back to survey herself, unclasping her knees. Sparks flew from her, and the cigarette. She retrieved it. “I catch everything, don’t I know it. There was this boy at the Proot, he used to say it.”

“The—Proot?”

“Prewitt Country Day.”

“Oh.” He remembered the term, from Hartford. “A school.”

She stared. “It’s just down the road from here.” She waved a hand, inland. “I used to go there.”

He often had a sense of how much in this landscape was just down the road from him, from childless people living in inns and barns. This was one of the times. “Which is which?” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Your people.”

“Mummy is Parker.” Suddenly she took another cookie. She gulped it. “Oh, you mustn’t think—Buzzie is very dignified. He can’t perform an instrument or anything, but he has this very serious interest. He even wanted to go to the Newport Festival, the jazz one. But Parker dragged him off to the Casals. Spain, or somewhere. She recruits for Gran, you see.” She hefted a sigh. “That’s why I’m here.”

“To see me?”

“Oh, no. Well, partly. But I meant here in this godforsaken end of nowhere. Home.”

It was almost dark now. “You must have a huge view from there.”

“Oh no, our part’s all overgrown, been that way since I was a child, not that I mind. And Gran won’t give us the money to—” She broke off. “Anyway, the only place you can see out is up-river. From Gran’s tower.”

“Oh yes, I think I’ve seen it,” he said. “An old American Gothic. Way, way on south there, there’s one open spot. Through those trees. But I should think my trees would block—the tenant’s, that is.”

In the dark, her eyes shone. “No. You’re our view.”

“Oh.” It had never struck him that anyone could look in on his solitude. “Dull for you.”

She was silent for a time. “Summer!” she said then. “Summer around here is sure a real dark nervous green.”

“Nervous?”

“Oh God,” she said. “Me again. I’m an absolute ensemble. We had a guest last week—Hollywood. That’s what they say out there. For anything awful.”

He repeated it. “It does have a hit.”

“Mmm.” Her voice was shrewd. “So did he.”

He turned on the porch light. “You mind telling me something? Exactly how many years ago was it you tasted peanut butter. Since you were six?”

She lowered her chin, then raised it. It was a more than nice face, not quite lovely, but sympathetically planed, already shaped both to give and to receive. She tilted it higher. “Ten. Ten and a half.”

He was less relieved than he should have been. “I judged you older, somehow,” he murmured.

Her look said that his judgment was profound.

“All I ask is to be old enough to be natural,” she said gruffly. “I just pray for it.”

“Other way round, I thought. When you’re young is when you are, I thought.”

“Not when you’re me. I’m just only bits and pieces of whosever’s around. Simply hilarious.” She gave a doleful shrug. “It can last on and on too, Buzzie says, the way it has with himsel—” She coughed. “Unless you have a serious interest.” She flung her head back, and her hands—flung the world off. “I don’t mind Gran, though. Funny thing, when a person is themselves, no matter what, they’re not so catching. To me, that is.”

“She’s old enough, I gather? To be nat—”

“Boy!” She giggled. “I’m supposed to be looking after her—and the cats, of course. And she’s supposed to be taking care of me. But that’s Parker for you.” She rested her chin on her knees, eyes up. “Anyway…summer around here is sure a…grim. I don’t see how you stand it. I should think it’d drive you absolutely nuts.” Then, with a horrified glance at him, she sat up very straight, open-mouthed, arms at her sides. He had a feeling that only manners, or perhaps the delicacy which already showed so plain on her, kept her from clapping a hand to that mouth.

He was used to this of course. One couldn’t expect them to be as used to his history as he was. “Tell me,” he said. “The favor you wanted to ask me.”

From what he could see of her cheeks they were red, but she answered in his own tone. “I was wondering. If by any chance you were going to be around next weekend. Labor Day weekend.”

“Why, yes.” The past afternoon rose up in him, dark pool so alien from this light refreshment its own dusk offered him. “As a matter of fact—I was planning to.”

“And you don’t seem to mind cats. At least, you’ve been feeding them.”

“We-ell, that’s about it, I don’t mind them. I prefer dogs, of course.”

“Of course,” she said. “But then—you don’t have a dog.”

He stared at her, at their image of this clearing, minuscule in their distance, across which a toy man, toy solitary, never walked a toy dog.

“Apparently Gran isn’t too old for twenty-twenty vision,” he said.

Her face was still pink. She kept it lowered. “Oh—she never goes up there. It’s hot as blazes, and full of dead flies. Lucky for me. You see—they’re supposed to be off the place altogether. The cats. And I’ve been keeping them up there, or trying to.” She looked up at him. “Cats need a place!” Her lip trembled.

“And yours is closed up?”

“Rented. So they could go, you know. And we couldn’t ask the renter to keep four. And for four, there just wasn’t enough—well, a kennel was just—out. So it was up to—” She cast him a faint smile. “Gran never thinks about money. Far as she knows, that’s where they are.”

“So it was up to you,” he said.

“Oh, I’m quite dependable.”

“Yes.” He watched that movie. “I can see that you are.”

“And it would all work out,” she said. “Only dammit, just for this weekend I’m being sent away.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “From your tower.” When his powerful garage light was on, as it often was if he worked evenings, then his clearing must hang in the trees like a fair. Still, it was cruel of him. “Like Rapunzel,” he said. “Or, no. Rapunzel was kept.”

“Oh, I’m not de trop, or anything,” she said. “Gran wouldn’t give a hang. It was Buzzie who insisted. She’s having a very sophisticated bunch up for the weekend, some of her screamers—you wouldn’t know about that—and…and I’m not supposed to be that sophisticated. So Parker had to arrange for me. Buzzie was really very strong about it.” She looked proud.

“Good for Buzzie.” A sudden thought struck him. “Cats give some people asthma,” he said absently.

Her face fell.

“Oh, not me,” he said hastily. “I thought perhaps that was why—”

“Gran? No, far as I know she just ha-ates them. Really she’s just one of those people who’s mortally afraid of them. There’s a name for it.”

“Mmm.”

“If one comes in a room where she is, she jumps up on a table. They do rather go for her extra. They know.” She chewed a finger. “Could be her color too, of course. She’s got some vein disease that doesn’t bother her otherwise. But she is blue. I expect you’ve heard.”

“N-no, I—” He leaned back, arms folded. “Your gran. Mrs. Aldrich. She jumps on tables. And she is bl—?”

“Really, rather turquoise.”

“N-no,” he said. “I h-hadn’t.” Hiccups engulfed him. “Heard.”

She waited until he’d finished, to stand up. “I didn’t think you’d laugh. At other people’s misfortunes. I didn’t really think you would.”

“I didn’t think so either.” But he felt as if he had been for a swim in laughter.

“Or you don’t believe me.”

“I believe you,” he said.

“I guess it was me then, you were—People do.”

“No, it was a coincidence,” he said. “I was laughing at the smallness of the world. Or the enormity. Anyway, please believe me. I can’t possibly explain.”

“Oh, I believe you,” she said. “I certainly do. And I appreciate your language.”

He stood up. “Cats need a place,” he said looking down at her. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to do the rounding up. Or else rename them.”

“Oh!” she said. “Oh-h. I could come tomorrow morning and start feeding them here. I could come here every day, so that by Friday—I don’t have to go, you know, for four whole days.”

She was going to be a bore, the kind that could be painful. He hadn’t come near one of her for years. He already wanted to get rid of her. She was the young. “Where are they sending you?”

She made a face. “Friends of Parker’s. They have a girl my age, and they keep wanting us to be. We haven’t a thing in common really. Bianca O’Brian. She’s French.”

“She doesn’t sound very French.”

“Oh, she had an ancestor—some marshal. To have an Irish surname in France is the utter. And her live grandmother is a princess in Rome.”

“Oh? And what color is she?”

She giggled. Then she stood on one leg.

He sighed. “And is Bianca at the—Country Day?”

“Oh no,” she gasped, “she’s already been at Le Rosey. And at Brillaumont. They couldn’t do a thing with her.” The other leg twined. He watched, in fascinated recall of how it had once felt, to be literally beside oneself.

She began to speak very rapidly. “She has this little face that pooches out, and she wears her hair scissored all around it, the way they do. Y’know? As if some sex-maniac had been chewing it. And all she has to do is scatter this talk of hers, like birdseed, and the boys come hop, hop. And wherever we others are wearing our belts, she isn’t.”

“I hope it isn’t catching,” he said. “It’s certainly utter.”

“Oh, it’s very poisemaking, to have a line,” she said. “If you haven’t yet got—the other.” And finally, the leg came down. Standing there, all of her implored him to see that she would give anything to rid them both of her company.

He would have liked to pat her, in sympathy. Instead, he looked at his watch.

“Oh, I must go!” she said at once. “Gran will be wi-ild.” Her hands crossed on her bathing suit. “I hope I haven’t given you a—a false impression of us. We’re really a very devoted family.” It gave him a glimpse of how she might be, once she had achieved what she aspired to—and a wish to give her something toward it. He hadn’t been able to give anyone else anything, all the long day.

“I knew a girl once,” he said. “Only a very little older than you are.” It came as a shock that Ellen had been only three years older than this girl when he married her. “She wasn’t any prettier than you. And probably not as—smart.” His voice ground. To think blasphemy was different from speaking it. “But she had a way with her, if it’s any use to you—I suppose one could call it a line. Whenever anyone paid her a compliment, or she was at a loss, she used to look at him sideways—you’ll know how—and say, Oh, you’re just saying that!” Once, at Niagara Falls, Ellen and he had donned the oilskins they gave one, and had walked through a passageway under and back of the Falls. Strange images, octahedrons of glass were at the other side of them. Ellen stood with these now. “It was very fetching,” he said. “It made the boys come hop, hop.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Thank-you. I’ll study it up in a mirror sometime.” Then she bounded away from him. He gathered that he had somehow offended her, but at least it had made her free as a gazelle. Across the glen, he watched her bound backward over a hedge.

His own youth had been awkward. “Pleased to meetcha!” he called from it. “Pleased to meetcha, Alden.”

She paused, then she came running fleetly. Halfway across the clearing, her hands clasped at her breast exactly as before. She rediscovered the barn, the screen door, him standing there. A moon had risen since, and was coldly shining. Walking as if her bathing suit were a skirt, she included the moon. It was like watching a tic of the imagination—hers—acted out on his obviously dream-forested land. “You’re just the way I thought you would be,” she said softly. “Good night—Gwee.”

She was there the next morning, and more of each day thereafter, sharing his lunches and once, in the company of a dealer-friend up from Pennsylvania, his supper, even offering him a muted assistance in the shop—and all with a manner so altered that he could find her unimportant presence lightly welcome. The dizzy reel of her confidences had altogether stopped, like a carnival ride shared by strangers. She made no more references to her family, and in his own mind they no longer struck the monster, papier-mâché attitudes she had so carefully pointed out to him along the ride. It was probable that they were quite ordinary, in their own way. Her subdued manner now almost called upon him to notice that so was she. Even the soapbubble chain of her giggling had vanished overnight, as if somewhere quieted at the fount. Overnight—it amused him to think—she might have consulted one of those Carmencitas who squatted over such matters behind windows crayoned with the zodiac, to which the words Readings, Advisor also adhered. Somewhere, in the depths of herself, she was being advised. In his own, he knew he was being worshiped, and felt himself too humble to question it. It was pleasant to find himself amiably concise with her in a way he was seldom able with his sharper-tongued New York friends—in the way perhaps, if things had been otherwise, that fatherhood sharpened the tongue. As a proprietor, he was used to lingerers, hangers-on, even apprentices such as, in the late, Urbino light of those August afternoons, pottering after him in her shirt and shorts, or shorn tan head seen bent across an intervening field of objects and tasks, she increasingly appeared to be.

In that light, age was their duenna—and her hair wasn’t gold; she was merely in the absolute russet of health. He recalled better now how the flesh at that age was aureoled in its own fuzz. But, as she lounged, sun-struck in the doorway, he had no visual terror of her; she wasn’t Ellen, but what might have been Ellen’s child. A dealer had just left them. The shop’s business was always by appointment; few itinerants came here.

“I admire you,” she said. “For the way you do nothing and people just come to you.” For the rest of the afternoon she was silent. It occurred to him, absent in mind as he’d been all week—or elsewhere in mind—that her prayer might be being answered; she was certainly more natural.

Early Friday morning, before leaving, she came by for an uncalled-for visit to the cats, who were by now accustomed to his feeding them. He was mildly surprised at her appearance as she bent daintily over their dishes—travel suit, hat and bag, hair brushed to a burnish, from what he could see of it, and a new, sooty dimension to her unremarkable eyes. When he heard she was walking to the station, he of course drove her there, and waited with her for the dusty, division local that would take her on to Grand Central, where she would be met by a chauffeur, she said, and driven on. The station, merely a junction beneath the once Indian highland, was bare of persons on this national weekend away. Beyond the sheds and other ramshackles, deserted outbuildings of another century, that quietly rotted here and at other up-Hudson junctions, the flat valley of water took the sun. As always, the wide expanse made him uneasy; he turned his back to it. The girl beside him, taking the compliment to herself, smiled gratefully. Now that she was leaving, he was suddenly great with a four-day-repressed need to be by himself again. When he put her bag up for her in the train, he was already irritated with her for making herself out a waif to him, as she could apparently do without moving an eyelash. There were others on the train dressed exactly like her, most with friends or parents it was true, but her own were returning in a few days. Still, her hat, though so regulation, reared back from her forehead like the pure feather of flight. He felt he ought to make it up to her, for not being able to keep his mind on her, somehow to explain to her that she was simply at that interim in her life when no one was around to do it. “Good-by,” he said. “And good luck on the weekend, don’t you worry now. You have no idea how different you look in shoes.”

He hurried home to his house, to be alone with being alone there. It was good, infinitely good to mosey and loll, a man in no way bereft of the small things of life, one whose phone was contrarily atap with friends, waifs and petitioners—merely a man who preferred dogs, but had no dog. Toward dusk, he set his meal on a tray, and once more brought it out to the porch. No one, entowered somewhere in the tree-murmurs, was there to watch him. At last he was at peace enough, if it could be called peace, to dwell on what all week he’d been powerless to keep his mind from—to let it ring its changes inside him.

On Tuesday, he had called the Canal Zone. During the day, there’d been no reason to fear she might be bereft; Tuesday, when the place reopened at four, was always a big day domestically, with cleaning to be done, suppliers’ salesmen to be dealt with, and the full staff in attendance, two waitresses, Carlos the cook, and sometimes Roy, the assistant barman. He had restrained himself from calling until six, the busy hour at the bar, when Sligo was always in attendance there. Roy had answered the phone. He had asked to speak to Marion.

“The missus, she’s in the kitchen,” said Roy. “Talkin’ to Carlos.”

Everyone knew of course that Carlos did drink; his temperament, often to be heard from the kitchen, was cherished as much as his cooking by those patrons who liked to think that they haunted a bar for its colorfulness. No one would have known of it otherwise. The staff, loyal to each other and apparently to the owners, never gossiped.

“You want to talk to the mister?” said Roy. “He’s awful busy, Mr. Callendar, we got a rush on that IBM Country Club crowd.”

“No thanks. Just ask her—” He hesitated. “I just called to find out if the lamp I left was okay. Just ask her if everything’s all right. About the lamp.”

“Okay, sir.”

“Maybe I’ll stop by myself to check on it tomorrow,” he added half to himself, as Roy hung up.

He did that. During the period when he had helped furnish the upstairs, the staff had grown used to his checking. Wednesday afternoons, as he knew well enough, Sligo and Marion were usually in town with the station wagon, doing all the weekly errands from meat inspection to talking improvement loans with the bank manager. He pretended to have forgotten this.

“Wednesday their town day,” said Roy. It was the usual midweek afternoon, trade dull. Everything appeared normal. Of course, everything always had. Why was he here?

“One day gets to be like another, out where I am,” he said. He knew how to talk to Roy, not that it took anything special; anyone did.

“Out where anybody is, around here!” Roy said at once. “I tell you, Mr. Callendar, we can’t wait for winter.” Winters, Roy did the Miami run. “We” meant his wife and mother, as devoted as he to the crowd, the tables, the money, the sun and the sea, in that order—to all the big-time externals of life. It was hard to imagine any of the three ever suffering from one of the inner varieties of love-death, certainly not from love of death, or even perhaps from the death of love. They were happy. But knowing how to talk to Roy meant knowing that even he, they, were in their own way extreme.

“When you going?” Guy said.

“December twenty-sixth, leave here six-thirty A.M.,” Roy said promptly. “I drive the buggy down, U.S. 1 all the way. Ma and Vee fly National. Next night we’ll all three be in our suits at the beach, dinner at the Alcazar. And three nights after. I don’t start work till the first.”

“Sounds wonderful.” He was having trouble keeping his mind on Roy. He stared at the diamond ring in its glass case. Roy’s blunt, shaven head didn’t shadow it.

“I tell you. Whyn’t you pick up and go down. Even for good, you could make a living. They got antique shops galore.” Roy was capable of assuring a banker that Miami had banks.

“Maybe I will.”

“I tell you.” Roy leaned forward. Now came the climax of this refrain. “If we could stay down there—” The preamble was always the same, the conclusion too. Only the metaphor varied. “If we could stay down there—!” Each of Roy’s eyes shone as if it were the only one he had. “Nee one of us ever ask nothing more in this life. Nee one of us ask for two more tail feathers from a duck.”

He almost forgot to make the drink-offer which was the ritual end of this conversation.

It was answered with the ritual headshake. “Thanks, Mr. Callendar. But I’ll have a cigar.”

He put his elbows on the bar, trying to recall how it felt to lean outward into life from some heavy focus, glowing or dark—instead of cordially, temperately, holding the phone. “Roy?” he’d said, as if Roy could tell him. “Roy—what’s your last name?”

Roy, just nipping the cigar, looked up. He spat the tip. “Grotz. Roy Valerian Grotz. Must be why I became a bartender, huh, whoever asks a barkeep his full name?” He doffed the cigar. “You ever ready for info ree down there, you just write me. Care of the Alcazar.”

“Thanks,” he said, “I just came to wonder. Don’t know why in particular.” Looking round the calm, empty bar, with its faint smell of bitter from old limbos, he’d shivered his shoulders. “Certainly not waiting for winter.”

“You’re telling me!” said Roy.

When he came home, he found a note from Marion in his mailbox; she must have driven by to put it there. “Please don’t call. And don’t come. My thanks.” With the proper chance, he might have met them there at the end of his driveway, she bending to thrust the note far back in the box, Sligo sitting immobile in the car as one sometimes saw him, hunched forward in the posture of men in World War I statuary groups—a member of the Battle of the Marne temporarily hacked from his stone brothers. Marion always drove.

Thursday—last night—his dealer friend, Sprague, had stayed for supper, and the girl. Though he addressed her by name, in his mind she was “the girl.” He’d been grateful for both their presences. In the summer dimness after the hot glade of the day, as they sipped the wine Sprague had brought, the rise and fall of their own voices had had a pre-fall, alfresco charm. The girl had sipped too, with an over-distinguished air.

“Nice kid,” Sprague had commented, in a moment when the girl had gone in for a bit.

“Lonely summer,” said Guy.

Sprague nodded. “I get ’em from the summer theaters. Apprentices. Sent round to borrow.” A former painter, he now dealt mostly in authentic American primitives, had a shop in the Poconos, and knew Joe and Milly Pink. “Terrible stuff they have,” he said.

“Terrible.” He listened to the echo. “Their boy is getting married.”

“Oh, I know that boy. Different from them.” Sprague, pouring himself another, had gestured with the bottle in the direction where Alden had gone. “Like her, they’re luckier. Kids like her, you can see their whole background behind them, ahead of them, too. Meet a boy of the same, and with a little luck they’ll live their whole lives that way. Lost in the background. The best way.”

Sprague’s history was unknown to him, or whether Sprague knew his—but that each had an unlikely one was one of the comforting assumptions of their trade.

“She looks a little like that print you have inside there,” said Sprague. “The girl in profile—who’s it by, Polliaiulo? Just a pretty girl of the day, but you can see the whole Renaissance behind her. I’ve got a little Federalist one at home now. A stiff little girl of the period, all her life, probably. Only the painter happened to single her out She isn’t the subject anymore. The subject is 1810.” He gestured again at Alden, who had just reappeared, and was now circling the porch, fiddling with the cats’ dishes. She bent there with the bursting shyness of one who knew herself the question. “Girls like that are like stencils,” he said. “For what’s around them. Boys too, of course. Hmm. Used to wish I could paint that way. You know? I wanted to do it for now.”

Alden came in and sat again at the table.

“What’s the name of this county?” Sprague asked her.

“Dutchess.”

“There you are!” said Sprague. “Girl of Dutchess County, with the light behind her. American primitive, circa 1970, artist unknown. All I need is a hundred years.”

“A hundred years and I’ll be dead!” said Alden gaily. She flung it out like a garland.

“They’ll be nice ones, honey,” said Sprague. “Just marry some neighborhood boy.”

“This neighborhood?” she said.

Both he and Sprague had roared, of course. “Alden’s family is musical,” he had said, in reparation.

“How about that!” Sprague had answered, with the trade’s tone-deafness. “I took in a harpsichord once. Inlaid with Wedgwood medallions. Not the blue jasperware either. The gray.”

He thought now of the girl riding to her destination, for today, somewhere on Long Island—of whether she would ride all her life jogging in the “background” expected of her, through the minor hazards to the final, profound ones—all of her happily submerged life. Right now, as Sprague had said, she was only a mild darkness at whose edges one could see the whole bright pattern of her segment of life, from costume plates of the period to chapbooks of the road-and-home-life of the times. It was in her very voice and no doubt in the fillings of her excellent teeth—all the successive decades of the woman she would almost certainly be, already counterparted by the versions of such women to be seen, in their own decades from blond hair to mauve, in the streets and shops of towns near places like Garrison. And it didn’t have to be that stratum, of course. A same unconscious innocence of itself could work in any—he remembered Hartford. As Sprague had said, innocence of its own import was what was required, of the life that was the subject, as well as of the painter’s hand. And even for those who knew themselves to be the extreme, there might be degrees of innocence. All that was needed was a hundred years.

As for Alden, the girl—He looked up at the trees, behind and behind whose layers there was somewhere a tower from which she had spied on him. He thought of the feather in her hat. Probably the next ten years would show. It might be touch and go—as to whether or not she would be singled out.

Toward dark, the Siamese returned to the edge of the clearing. All that week she had been away—since Monday. Her flanks were fallen in. As she drank greedily from one of the other cats’ saucers, he remembered with a contraction of sadness how, last time, she had proudly refused to be fed. When she had cleaned herself, she stood off and regarded him, eyes opening and closing, head tucked in. He had no trouble identifying of whom she reminded him—that snub head, those mask-clenched eyes. Nor had he any intention of taking her return as an omen—this random, itty-kat vagrant between silk pillow and forest. Just because he was now aware of what must have been being enacted for years at the Canal Zone, didn’t mean he could interpose there. Marion’s note had made him see his place—he was audience. All the watching in the world couldn’t force their stagelight closer to his own quiet demi-brown. After a while, as the moonless night closed in, he could no longer see for sure whether or not the eyes were still regarding him. Only a stencil remained, a head-shaped importance of darkness with the light behind it—ringed round with knives.

On Saturday, as he did the week’s shopping in town, he found himself looking with a purpose, in the store queues and the parking lots, down the market streets and at crossings. He was looking for a family, never the same one of course but one always constituted the same, that over the years had now and then presented itself to him without warning. He didn’t see them. But the quality of the change came home with him, like the edge slid into one at the change of seasons. He had never before looked.

On Sunday, he began the turnout of the barn, long self-promised, and never yet done. The weather was glorious, as people were no doubt saying all over the nation. Out on that highway from which he was a quarter-mile in, the smart ones were already bearing back to the city, to be safe there on the murderous third day of the holiday. There and elsewhere, cars must already be smashing and piling up, duty bound to fill in that annual Tuesday headline for which the funeral presses were waiting. Tuesday seemed to him distant as a new life, or an old one that had to be resumed. It was Monday, day of the smash, that had to be got through, here where the great stasis of land, water, and tree would uphold him in the silent conjunction of all their valleys. As he dragged object after object out on the lawn, none, however curious, lovely or valuable, seized him with that griping in the bowels of possession which afflicted others of his trade. He was neat of habit; there was really no need for this housecleaning. But he had an urge to see the barn as empty as it had been when he came. Meanwhile, there were corners of his eyrie he had forgotten. He turned up the first table he had refinished but had never sold, of itself an honest maple, but in the last rays of daylight too auburn by far. In its drawer, he found the one relic he had saved from the burned rubble, only because it predated it—a small vase of cloudy glass with a cheap scene scratched on it, from its position in his mother’s window, in his childhood always called the “sunset” vase. By nightfall, the place was emptied, except for his huge rolltop desk, weighted with business, that had been the first thing in here anyway, and hanging above it, that archaic reminder to “Resource.” He left those two inside, all the rest of the array turned out to the starlight. The night was as clear and soft as the inside of a grape; no rain would fall. Even if it did, all he stood to lose was some of the money which helped to keep him suspended in life, immovable to the waves of need. And he had all Monday to put everything back. He brought his bedroll to the center of the lawn, and lay for a long time looking up at the barn’s dark ogives, that now seemed to breathe with him, in their earlier communion. The barn was what he loved; he had rescued it.

By late afternoon Monday, he had everything back inside and in order again except for the lamps and the pictures, touches of comfort with which he would fill out the evening. He walked down to the mailbox on the highway: though there wouldn’t be any mail, there was always a chance that someone had left a note there. And it was his usual walk. Less than halfway back, having found nothing, he heard the clear bell of the telephone, brought to him by the river, a nagging rhythm of a phone that went on for a long time. It had stopped well before his desperate run brought him up short in front of it. The call had been a friend’s of course, faithful Poll perhaps, homing from her three-day weekend, or Quent reporting in, or any other of his phone regulars, like him suspended in a network of friends, not relations—horses running abreast in their own National, and today, like the rest of the world, galloping home. Still he stood there, and at last he dialed the Canal Zone.

On the instant, he heard the buh-beep, buh-beep of the busy signal, a quietus he might listen to now for as long as he wanted. They had taken the receiver off, as usual. They were in the eyrie couples made for themselves. That settled it. He listened to it telling him so—just then, it stopped. On the other end, someone had replaced the receiver. He redialed, heard the ring and the connect. No one spoke, but the wire was live; he could hear heavy, animal breathing. “Sligo?” he said. “It’s Guy.” In the pause, he could still hear that strangely reassuring pulse of brute calm. Then the line went dead. “Sorree,” said the operator, when he made his plea. “Sorree,” she repeated—a flute stuck at the stop of eternal patience. “That line is out of order now.” He hung there, in the queer dejection, less paralyzed than timeless, of those accustomed to lives ordered and rebuffed by the phone. When he wheeled about, the girl was standing in the archway of the barn.

“Well…hi!” he said. It was hard to focus on her, but he was grateful for it. “Welcome back.”

She was dressed just as he had last seen her, in what must be her “best” and now showed up as rather badly worn, and perhaps not even hers to begin with. Only the angle of the hat was still freshly her own, as if just before he turned she had reached up and knocked it back like a forelock. At his blinking smile, her hands clasped at her breast. It didn’t go with the hat.

“Well,” he said, “and how was Bianca La Borgia?”

She shook her head ruefully. “Don’t. We were horrid.”

“Oh, were we?”

She took a step forward. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said deeply. “That your name wasn’t Gwee.”

He couldn’t think of an answer.

“Bianca says you would pronounce it the English way. Guy. And that even if you didn’t, the French don’t say Gwee, but G-gee.”

“They do? I don’t know French.”

A perfect aureole spread on her face, in time with a long intake of breath. “If that isn’t just like you.”

“Not to know French.”

“No,” she said, on another breath like a chord. “To be the way you are.”

“Tell me about Bianca,” he said.

She spun halfway on a heel, came inside, touched a table, intimately tap-tapped a lamp. “Oh, you’ve changed things around. You’ve tidied.” She gave him a gay smile, turned away again, and spoke nonchalantly over a shoulder. “There were some boys there too. Putrid. We both agreed on that. Simply putrid. Anyway, Bianca had to wear her retainer the whole weekend.”

“Her—” Impossible medievalisms came to mind.

She gave him one of her shrewd, flat looks. “Teeth. She’s having them straightened. And she cheated all last year in Switzerland, and didn’t wear it. Now she’s getting to look all chipmunky again, so she has to.” She almost giggled. “When she has it in, her mouth looks just like Penn Station. Which reminds me.” The giggle was born as a shrug. She whirled again, infinitely Gallic. “Anyway, the boys had to hang around somewhere, and—I was there.”

He grinned. “All in your own teeth.”

She hung her head. “Of course,” she said in a low voice—“I didn’t let them make out, though.”

“Oh?” The phrase was new to him. “Of course.” He felt like a father. “Er—Penn Station, what were you going to say that it reminded you of?”

“Oh that. Bianca’s dream. We sat up all night, exchanging them. She has this dream she’s walking around inside something’s mouth, a great big pink cave. She has it all the time.”

He laughed out loud. “Common enough to all races. Jonah and the whale.”

She stared meaningfully, making their eyes meet. “Don’t be sil-ly!” Then she blushed. And suddenly she began to speak very rapidly. “Bianca says, you should never let a boy your own age make out. She says in France it’s the same for girls as for men now; you have your first aff-aire du coeur with a much older person. Like in Bonjour Tristesse.”

“You forget I don’t know French.” He took out a cigarette but didn’t offer her one. “Is that why she cheated—in Switzerland?”

She nodded, head bent.

He lit the cigarette. “Well, I can see you certainly stayed up all night.”

“We talked a lot about you. Bianca thinks—” She whispered it. “Bianca thinks you’re wonderful.”

“Oh, she does, does she. Why, what could that little—what could she possibly—” He broke off, to look at her.

“Your…your life,” she said. She was close enough for him to see that her eyes had filled with tears but that she was holding on to them, not letting them spill. It was too lovely a sight to turn from. He could see what she was going to be.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about the cats?” he said.

“Oh, the cats—they can manage.” The new planes about her mouth quivered, in time with her shrug. This time, she carried it off.

“You know…Alden,” he said. “I believe you’ve made it. You’re natural.”

“Oh? And meanwhile I’ve changed, I’d rather be a mystery.” She said it lightly, and carried this off too.

“You are,” he said. “I suppose you’re both.” She was near enough for him to identify her smell. He was stupid enough to touch her on the shoulder.

“Oh—” She made the most awkward of gestures, a cygnet breaking its glassy dream of itself—and yet saving it. She touched her throat, jerking her hand away from it toward him, as if, if she could, she would give him its apple. “Oh,” she said. “You’re just saying that.”

The kiss tasted of all she wanted to give him. He held on to her, merged in what for her was only a whole summer’s ache. Behind them, the barn waited, a bed among the trees, prepared. He well remembered that summer of himself. But even while he held her, in this silence a quarter-mile from the highway, he could hear within himself the sound of lives, regular as rockets, riding to their Monday smash. He had his perspective. He was the one who was unnatural here.

He was able to force her away from him. She was smiling, not in retrospect. He couldn’t see the landscape she was looking at, but he could remember how it had felt to be there. “I’d like—”

He stopped, for honesty. That his wife had been just this age when he’d had her, that his own child would have been the same age by now, was merely one of these peculiar marvels of time from which people made almanacs, hoping to tether within reasonable, man-made bonds the life that kept escaping onward. If this girl once stayed the night, she’d want to stay on always—he knew that much about her. She was no Bianca. And a week ago—he knew himself as well. A week ago, he would have singled her out.

“But I’ve got to go,” he said. It was true, the minute he said it. “I’ve got to run off this minute to somebody, somewhere.” He put his hand on her cheek. “It’s the only thing I can say to you worth a dime.”

He could see its worth, from her face—even at her age. He was the one who was running. She was the audience.

She knelt to the line of feeding dishes and hunched there, playing hand-over-hand with them.

“It’s important, where I’m going,” he said. “That much you can believe.”

She stood up; she nodded—both with her new grace. More than this was beyond her. “See you around.”

“Oh, Alden,” he said. “Luck.” He said it as if he could give it to her. “Luck!”

She must have looked at him this way from her tower, small but dependable, up among the dead flies, and the dark nervous greens of summer. She was able to toss her head. “No sweat!” she said. A talisman floated down to her from somewhere, a bit of Hollywood or Stanford, or even Spain. The corners of her mouth turned down, or in. “Don’t sweat the small stuff!” she said.

When she was well enough away, he reminded himself how seventeen loved promises. “And Alden—”

She turned, as if to a teacher, or a parent, without hope.

“No more binoculars. Promise me?”

Whatever her age was, it judged him. “Opera glasses,” she said. “Parker’s.”

She was well into the trees, almost lost to view, before he called after her. “The Siamese! The Siamese came back.”

Out on the highway in his car, it couldn’t be said that he had forgotten her, an after-image still resident in his body, in his now conscious flesh—the catalyst—sunk like a performer through a trapdoor. Around him, real cars whizzed loud as imaginary ones, but with the coarser hopes of people who were on the move. He wanted to put it to them, call out to them—I’m with you again. I’m part of this violence.

The road to the Canal Zone was solitary in the dusk, but halfway there, he thought he saw lights—were there people? It was the hour on the riverland when brilliance came and went in patches of gilt, the mauve mingling with the sun. His step crunched on the gravel. The courtyard was empty. In it, the Canal Zone squatted with the prescience of an old building, at dusk aware of all its history, tawdry and benign. The lower level of the games room was black under its overhung eaves. The top story, where the bedrooms were, was dim. Light was pouring like music from all the windows of the main floor bar. He could see the chandeliers at every second-story window, at battle with the retreating sun. Who could have entered the close-coupled dream that went on here, that only the personae themselves made real? Yet there wasn’t a sound, not a sound of trade.

Then in the bedroom story, a window was flung up. A figure appeared between its shutters and looked down at him. Beneath her wrists, the dim, pompom row of geraniums were a row of footlights that hadn’t sprung on. “How did you know?” she said. “I rang and rang, but no answer, and then he…how did you know to come?”

Now that he saw she was safe, he understood better his own errand—he knew for whose rescue he was here.

“Your phone’s out of order now.” This was reality; he remembered it—a blow, good or bad, that slowed the mind.

“He’s cut the wires. Oh, hurry. I haven’t heard him for the last hour. I’m afraid…that he—”

“Where is he? Down there?”

“Go there first,” she said. “I can wait.” She saw his bewilderment. “I’m—” Her shame told him that he was still a stranger. “I’m locked in.”

He ran up the service stairs, and released her. They crept down them, interlaced like skaters. “What’s that you have in your hand?” he said, but she was already ahead of him, across the passage into the main barroom.

“Yes,” he heard her whisper to herself. “Yes.”

Sligo stood in the damage like a man in a prism, angled at from all sides. His posture, bent at the knees, head in the vise of the shoulders, arms close to his sides, was like that also, a double image of a big man superimposed on a smaller one, a man enclosed in the bottle of himself. Around him, chairs were kindling, tables crumbs of zinc, their chromium legs junked skyward. A tidal hand had swept the glasses and decanters to a thousand refractions, through which waters were still seeping. The mahogany pillars of the bar had been scored, and behind them, the dark pride of the room, the etched mirror that ran its width, was irised open from end to end.

His eyes were what was moving. By these, they too could see his hallucination. It traveled wall over wall, haunted corners, or was sometimes beneath him, a small thing that teased. He tremored to it. Sometimes he screamed to it, though no one could hear. Clearly, he himself knew he was seeing it. In the hospital, these had been the most desperate.

Behind him, Marion crept closer, in her hand a syringe. His eyes whitened in their sockets; he saw her. Now that he saw her, she walked steadily toward him, at a bridesmaid’s pace. He trembled under her advance, but differently. He saw her, and knew she was real—this was her role. Above their heads, one saw the thousand refractions of it, of who might have forced the role on whom.

She stood beside him now, waiting. It was like a wooing. And quite suddenly, he was able to move. He moved with caution, outward through the parallelograms. He even pantomimed to her that he wasn’t dangerous. See, I’m only grasping for the bar, steadying myself against it. So that I can stand, and bear what you have for me. His lips turned in. The sound that came from behind them wasn’t fear, but the catholic moan of all animals, forgiving someone for the general pain. Then he held out his left arm. Cool as a lay sister, she took care of him. Then she stepped aside. But her eyes flickered a signal, at Guy.

Sligo surveyed them, amiably. Sleep was already arriving in him; he was sane with it. The shakes caressed him once, then he stood pridefully straight. He extended his right arm, palm stiff, as one did for doctors; he could have balanced a tray. Slowly he clenched the hand to a fist, drew the fist in toward his own chest and outward, shoulder high, his eye following it as if magnetized. Head in bas-relief, he stood that way, a gladiator measuring the strength in his mortal glove. He spoke to it, clearer than Guy had ever heard him, but his eye did not turn. It wasn’t possible to say whom he addressed—a plaster cast perhaps addressing its own inhabitant, its small Greek soul.

“I saw you coming,” he said. “All the time.”

He raised the fist, triumphant. Too late, they saw, shining beneath it on the counter, the glass case, still intact with its ring. He plunged the fist in through the case and down. As the glass trap darkened with his blood, he smiled.

It was Guy who broke the box apart and got it off with his own quickly bleeding hands, his shoe, and some implement Marion brought him, that dropped back into the rubble again, unidentified. By a miracle, the artery wasn’t severed; with all the glass splinters in the flesh, they couldn’t have tourniqueted it in time. By some miracle so often granted to the Williams of this world, to the Sligos.

And now, Sligo’s hand lay upturned in the sedated sleep that had finally overcome it, its owner, once more deserting his bystanders, stretched on the floor to which this time he had slipped so easily. It had been so lucky that the sedation was already in him; his bystanders could never have overcome him in time. By the usual luck. On the hand, the many surface cuts and slices had flooded with red on the instant, filling the box like an ewer. But the wound on the wrist, that should have been the worst, was nothing, already puckering and congealed—not a fine seam, but a seam. Beneath it, whatever directed this man still pulsed, an anatomist’s secret.

And she was finished crying now, or retching—the sound, dreadful as it was, a relief to him, a sign that her life had not rendered her inhumanly able to bear anything. Still, her competence was what he had to fear. He held her, each contracted toward one another, inward and away from the blood that was sticky and dried on them both.

Finally she was able to speak. “It’s the—repetition of it. The repetition. I can take each separate time. But the other finally gets to you. Like a rhythm. Like killing with drums—don’t they do that somewhere?” She slid apart from him, from where they sat, on the floor too. “And now you’re part of it,” she said. “Of our Mondays.”

He stood up at that. “Oh, no. No, Marion. No.”

Her eyes were the first to lower. “Of course not. How could I think—?”

“Because it’s your habit, to—” To defend, he’d been going to say, but saw that it wasn’t just. “Because it’s gone on so long, whatever it is. A kind of double dream.” He brushed himself off, plaster dust and other crumbs, wooden splinters, and here and there, a sparkle. He bent to take her hands, and didn’t take them. “He’s got to go to a hospital, you must know that. Not a local one. Not for local wounds. A place where he can be—for a long time.”

When she spoke, it seemed she hadn’t heard this. “I lied to you,” she said. “Last time. When I said ‘I used to be fond’…I don’t know really, what I used to be.” She looked up. “So I don’t know—what I am now.”

“As it happens,” he said. “As it happens, I—I know of such a place. Usually it takes longer to get in, much longer. But if I ask—” He swallowed. “I think they’ll come on my say-so. I think they would come, in an hour or so. Today. Now.”

Her glance wandered, vague over a shoulder. “The phone’s…cut.” The voice might have come over just such a line.

“That stuff you gave him,” he said. “Can I leave you here with him? How long does it last?”

“For hours,” she said. “You can leave him. I often do.”

“I’ll go in the car, then.”

The scar marks under her eyes stood out sharply. The resemblance bled him, but instructed.

Finally she spoke, an inch nearer. “The public phone booth, in the games room. It’s separate. I forgot that.”

She got up and followed him to the door, picking her way through the breakage. “While you…I’ll—pack a bag for him. And I’ll—” She looked down at her stained hands and dress, almost thoughtfully. He nodded. Both of them cast a backward glance at the room’s ruin. From hers, he couldn’t tell what she thought of it.

When he had phoned and had cleaned himself up in the little washroom under the stairs, he looked in again at the main bar. The figure there lay just as they had left it. There was no one with it. No answering call came from the upstairs bedrooms. He went down to the games room, in its heavy-browed way a beautiful room when bare of people and left to its armorial shadow. He had no panic at not finding her here. She would have a place of her own, where she could hide. It was intended that he find it. Through the open door, he saw a bright sweater, down on the pier.

He walked down to the little pier, past the over-cute tables and umbrellas toying against the river, the paper scurf of tourists, the beach unused, lapped and lonely, the water healing dark through its pebbles. She was there, on a last bench. He sat down beside her.

The long evening, projected by the river, was still alight. Less than an hour had passed since he had arrived here. There was still a disc of sun, the part that always sank within minutes.

“Will they come?” she said.

“In a couple of hours.”

They were well out from shore here, naked to the whole expanse, whose orange magnificence would for some time hold off the arriving blue.

“Open views make me uneasy,” he said after a while. “They didn’t used to. Before. Or when I was a child. But maybe that’s because in those days, we didn’t have a view.”

“I couldn’t do without this place. I grew up on the river, but it’s not only that. Nobody comes here much, and it’s always—” She stood up, spread her arms.

Behind him, he felt her turn to look back at the house. He didn’t turn with her. In front of him, the long casement of water extended, infinitely extended, on and on. In that wide, stealing amber, the little beach in front of them lay suspended, as small in that infinity as his mother’s sunset vase, with its paintscratch of beach and one palmetto.

“There’s not enough ruin there!” he heard her say. “There’s not enough ruin to show.”

His lips were stiff. “There never is.”

When she sat down again at her end of the bench, she was as he’d always known her, the old Marion, remote, cold with an experience whose poles he was only beginning to see. He waited. This time there was no other way to help.

She spoke, an inch nearer. “Do you—want to know about it?”

He looked back at the Canal Zone, at a house which, for all its ruin, was still standing. “The original injury?”

“In comparison with what we made of it, you mean.” He felt her grimace.

“I’ve no such secrets to tell you,” he said, turning. “Everybody already knows my—” His life was on the roster for all to see, an open book. He was used to the humility of it.

Her head was lowered. “I once heard you say—you come from Hartford.”

“Yes…Why?”

“I went to school in a little town not far from there.”

“You did? Which one? I know all the schools up there—and all the towns.” He paused. “But you grew up here, you said. On the river.”

She nodded. “Then you’ll have heard of it, maybe. It had rather a—gardens. And a fence. Miss Trent’s? In Netherton?”

Once more. Reality slowed the mind—a profound deduction, especially twice. Once more, out of his sphere. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve heard of it.”

“Mmm.” She was facing away from him. The sun edged down—gone. The world was flowing; let humans never forget it. “Well, you know that old story, the girls who marry their riding masters? You ever wonder what happened to them?” The sunless air showed him every line of her face. “To her.”

“I had a theory about you,” he said. “But it went the other way round.” On one of the hands in her lap there was still a faint smear of brown. He touched it. “This happened, then? Sligo.”

“No!” she said, rubbing at the smear. “Not Sligo. Not yet. Ferenc Von Dombaretski, Captain. Son of Captain the same, of his something Majesty’s umpteenth Hussars. Polish on the one side, Magyar on the other. Miss Brown, who was the Miss Trent of our day, told us how to pronounce it—Magyar. He rode like a prince, she said, too well for us really, but his mother wasn’t noble. He had a bale of uniforms, swords, saddles, medals and brasses, that filled the chauffeur’s cottage. Hereditary candlesticks—knives. And always the stories, stories about horses.” She folded her hands. “And at the foot of his bed, a pair of black velveteen house slippers with silver crests on them, much worn.”

He made the sound one made to children detailing their nightmare.

“Oh, yes, very long ago,” she said. “I was seventeen.”

“Ferenc Von Dombaretski,” he said. “Sounds—he was a fake, then?”

“You know—” She was silent a space. “I don’t know for sure. I’ve never been sure. And later on, of course…it didn’t much matter.”

On the river it was later on, too, but still tartar yellow and bronze. Even the world at times thought slowly.

“There’s such a lot I don’t know,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how much. There’s so much I missed.”

“And a lot you know,” he said. “A hard exchange. Never belittle it.”

After a while he said, “Don’t look back at the house. When they come, we’ll hear them. Go on.”

“On? Why, that’s all there was, really. The rest, you know enough to imagine. In a straight line.”

A straight line would be horses, men of that same bow-legged world. “Then, Sligo?” he said. “Then you married him?”

She looked at him for so long that he could see the plage darken behind her, at the pace of the seal-colored cloud traveling west like a barge. “The original injury. Have you forgotten it?”

“A false name!” he said, then. “It was Sligo, under a false name.”

“Yes. Yes. There wasn’t a Von Dombaretski, anymore. Oh, there had been. All his papers and medals, Miss Brown saw them—they were always very careful at Trent. And all his gear, that Sligo, traveling with him for so many years after all—had inherited.” She gave a short laugh. “That’s what happened to her, that girl. It was even more romantic than one had imagined. She didn’t marry the riding master. She married his Irish—ostler—they once used to call it. It has its own lineage. Groom.”

“I see,” he said.

“Are you sure you do? Do you see that this wasn’t what I minded? Do you see that after all of it, in spite of it—and in spite of the fact that I couldn’t half talk to him, and he couldn’t or wouldn’t—what I minded was that I…still?” She sat back. “Oh, there were the social things too of course, my family cutting me, and my friends too, and no money—but I was young, resilient enough. That was only the part of the story you’d expect. But it was the other, that did us in. That he could never get used to what he’d done, or to me he’d done it to. And that I—” She choked on it. “That I—still—” She touched Guy’s arm, “You know something? After all these years, I don’t know him well enough to say whether it’s that he can’t talk to me, or he won’t. After all these years.”

He thought of the diamond, thankfully lost somewhere in the shards back there, and of all she must know about fakes that became real.

“And then—” Her voice was hard. “Then I began to do him injury. I was built for it, of course. Speech, taste, needs, a million discriminations people like me, girls like me, didn’t even know we were born with. Oh I was primed for it.” Again she put her hand on his arm. “Do you know?” she said, her voice so charged, so tender that he caught an unbearable glimpse. “He just couldn’t think what else to do when Von Dombaretski died. Since he was fourteen, he’d spent his life with him.”

“So you’ve never stopped pitying him,” he said.

The cloud passed on, stately.

“When I said I didn’t want or hope for anything—” she said. “I lied. The inn was my idea—an aunt died and left me money. We were on our uppers, we hadn’t known anything else but uppers, and it looked like heaven. The years we worked on it—those weren’t so…” She got up and strode away to the edge. Standing there she looked back, inland. “But now—how I hate it, how I hate it. I see all I don’t know, here. Everything passes by here. All the possible. It’s like perfume. All the possible passes by.”

In his mind’s eye, in his muscles, he got up from the bench, seized her by the shoulders and shook her, not for herself alone.

As she strolled back to him, he watched her absently pause to turn over a crushed paper cup with the toe of her shoe. She stooped to tear it up and bury the fragments. He saw how the beach—merely a prospect to the inn—was tended.

“So now you know. What we made of it—between us.” Crouched over, not a foot from him, she prodded the sand again. This time, only a natural object was revealed, a worn stone. “What I made.” Stone in palm, she looked up at him. “Too much.”

He bent and drew a finger along each of those permanent shadows on the bone, her cheek marks, tracing what almost could be seen there beneath them. “No—you couldn’t have helped it. You—were singled out.”

At that moment, a gun reported, clearly—even with the ricochet of the river, not a gnat in the ear. She stood up. He stood up with her. The Canal Zone watched them grasp one another. All the possible passes by.

Color returned to her face slowly. “From the Point—West Point. A sunset gun, I guess. You can always hear it on hazy days here, when sound travels north.”

Across her shoulder the night was arriving—volumes of blue through whose drift, down all the darkening inlets of the shoreline she must know so well, there were being lighted, one by one, the small, persistent fires of habitation. It was said of people native to this place that even if brought up from a cellar blindfolded, they could tell which way they were turned to the current of the river—by the play of the air on their faces, in the felt promise of the harbor.

“Can you see my place from here?” he said.

She took his hand and guided it. “There. Between there and there. That’s your place. Between the dark stretch, and that one high light that’s just gone on. There you are—in that great fan of trees, some of the biggest on the river. They hide the barn though, even when the leaves are off, in winter.”

He thought of her standing here in the ice-gray winter days of people who live in inns, looking past his trees and forward, watched by whom? It was always the other people who had the view.

“I suppose…they’ll send an ambulance?”

He nodded. Arms still around her, he understood the strain words must put upon those blind who remember or dream of another communication. The inn watched them, as if only it had sufficient history not to judge.

“Do I go along in it? With him?” She bowed her head. “I suppose.”

In each window of the Canal Zone, a chandelier stood out strong against the night, beside each, its double. They had conquered the day.

He seized her by the shoulders and shook her. “Pity yourself. For God’s sake. So you can leave here.” He dropped his hands, in tribute to the brute lack of honor in the processes of life. “So we can go.”

He couldn’t imagine her answer. When it came, it did so on her own terms. Brutal too, she touched his cheek. “He saw you coming,” she said.

Lights of cars trickled through the hedge that bordered the highway. The Canal Zone’s powerful guide light, not visible from here, was there to welcome the one car that would be for them. Walking back, they had time for the swift catechism that comes when absolution is near.

“Singled out?” she said.

“It happens.”

“And no one—is to blame?”

“Not—forever.”

“And the ones who are left?” Even in the dark he could see her movement toward the figure lying somewhere inside there. Asleep or dead, the ones with whom one could no longer mesh nerves or spirit, were the same.

“We’re the ones who’ve been left,” he said.

“He was romantic to me once. Maybe he still is. It wasn’t all bad.”

“There’s no need to—throw that away. One’s history.”

Car lights passed, not for them.

“Yours,” she said. “I think Sligo knew it.”

“Mine? Everyone does.”

They reached the dark-browned eaves of the games room.

“But he never said. He didn’t talk.”

And Sligo would have been her only gossip. He recalled now how her glance had followed the women going back into the world from the world of the bar, a glance too proud to take confidences from them, across that bar.

“I thought you must have a special one, from all those Mondays—the quiet ones.” She gave him the thoughtful smile of the isolated. “I thought you must have been married once, that always shows. I couldn’t tell about children; unless people talk about them you can’t tell how they feel about them, in a place like this. But it seemed to me—somehow…that you were dead to…family.”

It moved him beyond reason, that she should have been creeping painfully, a slow but conscientious student, toward this knowledge of him that was so brashly open to the rest of the world.

“That’s why I—” She flung back her head. “—ought to tell you. Children. We never tried not to. There was nothing separately wrong with either of us. I think we must have been like two acids, that could only corrode.” Again her head reared. “But the things I don’t know, I don’t belittle them. And I’m only thirty-four.”

“Mine are dead.” A pale light filtered on her cheeks, those starved flanks. He traced them again, moved toward what he had thought himself never again to be moved. “But I—I can see how you would look in your prime.”

“Ah, you don’t know me,” she said in her tough, blunt way.

It seemed to him that all the brief, successive pictures he had of her were being filled in with a tough central dark criss-crossed with broad black strokes of knowledge that might shift but never fade. “Hard to know. We’ll be.” He peered into the games room, in which a floating will-o’-the-wisp of light fancied a surface now and there to stencils of darkness, circles of knives. He turned back to her. “We’ll be strange enough for each other. We’re the extreme.” From which the single-legged, each to each, may still take heart.

“I thought—” She put out a hand. “The quick way you got on to the hospital. You—have friends there, perhaps?”

“Yes, I have friends there,” he said. “Many friends.”

She took his hand at once. Standing backed against the old house, they stared into the blind current of the river, and beyond it, into a current wider than it or any harbor, into that vast multiplicity where there might be no sure order of good or evil, but surely a movement, too wide even for unease, too irrational, of which both of them knew. He knew it was there, this force that had flung him out, and drawn or flung him in again, this movement which, like some god of unbelievers, which did not bear thinking of or speaking to, both took away, took away—and gave. This was nothing to make either a religion or an unfaith of; it was merely the doctrine, not to be palmed onward, which lived somewhere in the tough, central dark of those to whom it had happened. For extreme cases there was sometimes—an extreme magic. It could be merely a falter, a pause in that vast territory which humans could never persuade themselves was not human, one of those illuminated moments when unseen kinships brushed one like lepidoptera passing, when birds flew south from a north they did not see as misery, and in a clearing, his own clearing, a man came upon rabbits, paws lifted to the quiet of evening, staring at Mecca.

“So we can go,” she said. “Where?”

He pointed, to that spot on the dark where a barn which was not to be seen behind its fan of trees, not even when the leaves were down in winter, now lighted up the dark for him like the bush in the Bible. In the conflagration he’d never dared hope for, his house was burning, though no one else could see it, and because he’d got here on time, it was not consumed.

When the long car that was for them turned in and bore down upon them, it came down the lane with normal slowness, not nemesis, nor yet a miracle. Its revolving dome-light bypassed the night skies, stood the trees at stage-green attention, swept white the gravel and swiveled to rest on the Canal Zone. The old inn returned the light like a stockade from another century, indifferent to either. Pointed at it, the long hood of the car seemed to him a hold in which he could see the stored lives of all those in hospitals, each life regularized round its one small hole of the possible, like those prints in which if one looked hard enough one could always see somewhere the upside down V of Fujiyama. It even crossed his mind to wonder where they might be sending Sligo, into or out of what sphere.

They walked straight into that treacherous glare.

There came back to him again how it felt to be only half-alone—in all its separate lights and darks. Once inside the double dream, one no longer tallied these, or no longer dared.

“But I don’t know you,” she said. “You don’t need me.”

“No,” he said. “You don’t know me.”

“You’re sure? You’re not—you’re not just—”

“No,” he said. “I’m not just saying it.”