TWELVE

At the last moment, they decided to take a picnic lunch. They could build a fire in the living room at Flynders and eat before their own hearth.

The morning did not look promising; the sky was slack and wet looking. Yet there was a kind of festivity in wrapping sandwiches in waxed paper, in rinsing out the Thermos. A few grains of sand spilled from the straw picnic basket onto the kitchen counter.

Sophie had awakened to hope and intensified alarm. The unlikelihood of the cat’s being rabid had, mysteriously, increased the horror of the possibility that it might be. She moved quickly, packing the food, making an efficient pile of sheepskin-lined coats and gloves, the car blanket, a copy of Out of Africa which she would read to Otto on the way out. It was sure to be colder in Flynders than in the city. In Flynders, there was real weather.

“You feel better,” Otto announced with evident relief.

“Yes. It’s stopped hurting. But I’m high as a kite, thinking about that phone call—”

“You can’t be worried about that!”

“There is a possibility.”

“It’s a formality, not a possibility.”

“I found your keys on the couch. You must have dropped them there last night.”

“Take your pill.”

They drove through miles of Queens, where factories, warehouses, and gas stations squeezed up against two-story, two-family houses so mean and shabby that, by contrast, the ranks of uniform and tidy tombstones rising from cemetery islets that thrust up among the dwellings seemed to offer a more humane future. Sidewalks, brutal slabs of cracked cement, ran for a block or two, then inexplicably petered out, and along the center of the tarmac streets, short lengths of old trolley tracks occasionally gleamed among the potholes. Here and there, the skeleton of a vast new apartment complex sat on the rent ground; tree roots and rocks and earth rolled up around its foundation. Cries of boredom and rage were scrawled across the walls of factories, and among these threats and imprecations, invitations and anatomy lessons, the face of an Alabama presidential candidate stared with sooty dead eyes from his campaign posters, claiming this territory as his own. His country, warned the poster—vote for him—pathology calling tenderly to pathology.

There were some churches left, most of them small, of red brick or pocked stucco. But there rose one great baroque Spanish cathedral, its entrance barred by iron gates. It sat in the middle of that crawling, suppurating urban decay like a great chilled eminence, half-dead with its own arrogance.

“I wish there was another way to go to Flynders,” Sophie murmured.

“Read to me,” urged Otto. “We’ll be out of this soon.”

“It’s so hopelessly ugly.”

“Don’t look at it,” he said quickly.

She opened the book on her lap. “I’m going to need glasses soon,” she said, looking down at the page. “Can you still read the telephone directory without trouble?” He was not listening to her. He was staring intently through the windshield at the desolate road ahead.

“Otto?”

“I was thinking of what Charlie would have said if he’d heard me tell you not to look. How he would have pounced on that! What an example of my lack of social conscience!”

“Is your every thought examined in the light of what Charlie would have to say?”

“Do you remember years ago, when people liked to quote Thoreau, that line about the quiet desperation of most men’s lives? One morning, a month or so ago, I went to Charlie’s office and found him slouched in front of his desk, staring at what he had written in block letters on a piece of paper. It was that quote. I asked him, in what I thought was a light tone—although as you know I’m not so good at that sort of thing—if his life was quietly desperate? I don’t know…the morning was sunny, sunlight on the rug, and it was cold outside and I wanted everything to be all right…. He looked at me with absolute hatred. He said that that quote was a prime example of middle-class self-love. And when I said Thoreau had not intended it as such, he shouted that intention meant nothing, all truth resided in what a thing was used for. There were clients in the waiting room and the lines were jammed with incoming calls. Charlie looked to me like an Irish gorilla, lurching over his desk, about to murder me. I told him he was full of shit. I was stunned by his loathing of me. Then he brayed that no oppression had ever been so difficult to resist as middle-class oppression, because it wears a thousand faces, even the face of revolution, and that it is an insatiable gut that can even nourish itself on the poison its enemies leave lying about to destroy it. I asked him what alternative he had in mind and he buzzed his secretary and told her to send in his appointment.”

“But life is desperate,” said Sophie almost inaudibly.

“Did you say life is desperate?” Otto asked, leaning toward her. Then suddenly he began to laugh. “Read to me,” he said again. “Go on.” So as the Mercedes joined the thickening traffic that was making its way east on the highway, Sophie read to Otto about the green hills of Africa.

At midmorning, they stopped for coffee, and sat peacefully and silently in the overheated coffee shop until Otto, attempting to open a plastic container of cream, spilled it all over himself. He began to curse, making an addition to his expletives with the remark that all change was for the worst.

He looked more familiar to Sophie than he had for two days, and she realized suddenly that he had been restraining himself since Friday, restraining his character for her sake, as though he had shoved into a closet some disreputable relative whose presence might shatter her. She wanted to reassure him—she was thinking of what to say—when he asked her exactly what Charlie had said to her Friday night.

He would continue to ask her, she thought, and she would continue to be unable to tell him. She no longer remembered what Charlie had said to her Friday night.

“Nothing much about you, except what I’ve already told you.”

“What he said about me doesn’t matter. He was up to something just because it was you he was talking to.”

It was clearing outside. Through the window, she saw a ray of sunshine widen on the roof of their car and on a filthy red Cadillac parked next to it. She looked around the coffee shop aimlessly for the owner. There was a couple sitting at the counter, middle-aged, plump, overdressed.

“What could he be up to with me?”

“Disorder. The creation of disorder.”

“You know what you sound like? A person who has just gotten a divorce and is telling himself that his whole married life had been nothing but torment.”

Otto sighed. “I suppose so.”

They got up, and Otto went to pay the sleepy cashier, who was bathed in sunshine. Sophie passed the middle-aged couple and heard the man say in a fierce mumble, “I.Q. Fuck you! If he doesn’t work, who cares how bright he is!” The woman’s black chamberpot hat seemed to rise slightly above her head. Her mouth snapped shut as though she’d bitten off a thread.

As they passed it on the way to the Mercedes, Sophie glanced into the window of the Cadillac and saw, side by side on the front seat, a large box of Kleenex and a sleeping Pekingese.

“I want Charlie to be gone,” Otto said as he backed away from the coffee shop. “Silent and vanished.”

“People always seem to have to make a lot of noise when they leave,” she said—except for people like me, she thought privately, remembering how submissively and silently she had slunk away from Francis. But then, there was nothing she could have done about it. Yet, for a bitter moment, she was caught up in the old tormenting question: What if Francis had been available? If the door had swung open, would she have gone through it? She glanced over at Otto. Francis had not only deprived her of himself. He had cheated her of her certainty about Otto.

“Why does he have to destroy me?”

“Is that what he’s doing?”

He grunted. “No. But I’m getting bruised…people I’ve known for years asking my secretary about my health. It disgusts me.”

“The clients who stay with you will forget about it soon enough. People don’t think about other people that much.”

“If you’re a lawyer, they do. If they’re in trouble, they do. I’d be better off if I were more like my father. He based his life on the assumption that nothing would come of anything. And hope broke in upon him the way disappointment breaks in on other people’s lives. He hated hope. It unmanned him. Assume the worst, my son, and you’ll never be disappointed…. I was in the hospital room when he died. He couldn’t speak or move, and one side of his face was paralyzed. But he broke through that coma just long enough to give me a lopsided smile. I knew what he meant. ‘See? See how it all ends?’”

“We take the next exit.”

“I know….”

They drove around a cloverleaf and then onto another parkway.

“We’re not far now,” Otto said cheerfully. “We’ll be all right. It may be tight for a bit, with money. Two people I’d counted on have gone with Charlie. There was an exchange of sorts, though.” He laughed, and continued, “You should see what I got in trade. I could have told her she’d better go to someone else because I didn’t deal with such problems. But she was so damned forlorn. Charlie had neglected her, got bored, I suppose—Charlie gets bored easily—and I decided I’d take her on, just to prove I could, I guess.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Cynthia Kornfeld. She arrived at the office with a fractured index finger and eighteen stitches in her scalp.” He accelerated. For Otto, it was a dramatic opening to a story. It occurred to Sophie that he had been excited at the idea of doing something that went against his usual inclination. He glanced over at her, smiling, gauging the effect of his words, perhaps. She laughed back and told him to go on.

“Her husband is a rat—I shouldn’t say that, it’s the wrong approach—named Abe Kornfeld. Two years ago, he struck it rich. What he had done was to buy up a dozen used typewriters from one of those stores on Canal Street. Then he took them apart and reassembled them in some mangled way and arranged the keyboards so that they spelled out mystic nonsense words. A gallery gave him a show. He got $2,000 for a standard and $1,000 for a portable. That was his first show. He developed categories which allowed him to charge considerably more—a standard Royal, for example, was a lot more than a standard Smith-Corona, but a portable with Japanese characters was worth more than both of them. They’d been living in a floor-through flat on Hudson Street for fifteen years. He turned one room into a factory, and she gave up her substitute teaching—she’d been supporting him while he was a painter—and they began to turn out these things at an extraordinary rate, said it was easy, she’d show me if I wanted to do it myself, and still they couldn’t keep up with orders. She was stunned by the money that poured in—and scared. She said she felt it was just another novelty and would drop out of sight as soon as something else came along. But he said it was a breakthrough, that the destruction of a typewriter and its reconstitution, its humanization, as a kind of oracle, was a direct blow at American Philistinism. He broke up his old easel and threw it out on the street, and he tore up all his former work. He began to buy things. A Piaget watch, for example. He removed both hands from it and told her he wouldn’t be corrupted by his good fortune if he indulged his taste for luxurious objects but always deformed them enough to ruin their function. The evening he beat her up, he began by arriving home late, just after she’d put the child to bed. She was doing most of the work on the typewriters by then, and she didn’t know where he went during the days. He was carrying a copy of Mein Kampf that night. When she complained that she was tired and they’d have to get some Chinese food or a pizza for supper, he threw the book at her, then said she couldn’t deny that Hitler had had a lot of style. Then he told her that they were having a dinner party. He had already ordered Senegalese food from some joint in the Village, and had invited all the people to whom he had ever owed money. Should she make coffee and a dessert? she asked. He didn’t care what she made as long as it wasn’t square. She felt something special was required, but she had nothing in the house except several boxes of strawberry Jell-O. She cooked them up and poured them into the biggest bowl she had. Then, instead of bits of fruit, she dropped in nickels and dimes. Whether she was celebrating their new affluence, or making an ironic comment, I don’t know. I suspect the former since she is not a woman capable of much irony. When she brought in the dessert, she was applauded by the guests, but Abe flung himself at her and had to be restrained by two painters before he did her serious harm. I guess he must have been sore at her horning in with a joke of her own.”

“Is that all? Is that what she wants to divorce him for?”

“She says he will beat her again. And he’s been getting ugly with the child, too. Everything has changed in a way that makes it impossible for it to change back. She speaks very slowly and flatly and with absolute conviction.”

“And what does he say?”

“Nothing. He’s disappeared.”

“No one knows where? The gallery? Friends?”

“No one.”

“Does that frighten her? He sounds crazy. Maybe he had an accident.”

“She is one of those people with remarkable patience, but a terminal point beyond which they never go. She told me she never complained about what he was doing, and never questioned him. Now, she behaves as if she wouldn’t care if he did turn up dead.”

“Is she pretty?”

He didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “I don’t really know. I’ll look, next time.”

“Don’t you look at women?” she asked slyly.

He didn’t answer her and she didn’t repeat her question. She felt a mild estrangement between them, just a little moment of tension. She thought about it, turning it over in her mind as she might have turned over an object in her hands, trying to understand her own intention, which she knew had been disruptive. Why interrupt the pleasant boredom of the drive? The sky was all clear now, a bland, washed blue, and the occasional house that could be glimpsed from the road looked freshly painted and prosperous and eternal; and Sophie thought of the great gray sea of sludge through which they had driven only an hour or so earlier.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

“Oh, my father again. When he was in the room, we all watched what we said. You wouldn’t have liked him. He didn’t care what people talked about as long as they spoke to the point. And a subject had to be completed before a new one was begun. Thoughts had to be ordered, like boxcars on a track. You could not, when describing a summer in Paris, begin to speak about Istanbul.”

“What if you did?”

“He had very prominent knuckles and they would turn white. A change in subject, until he thought it had terminated, offended some inner sense of progression. It enraged him. In a similar way, if you were a chemist you could not speak about atonality. You might say you liked it. But no judgments.”

“You’re right. I wouldn’t have liked that.”

“Here’s our turnoff.”

The village of Flynders, from which they were now only two miles, had a winter population of fewer than one hundred families, most of whom were entirely dependent on the summer people for their income. In the full summer swing of July and August, the population swelled to at least two thousand, and last summer this number had been augmented by a group of New York advertising agency people who had purchased an old estate, torn down the thirty-two-room house and outbuildings, subdivided the acreage, and started to build a group of houses that was supposed, eventually, to resemble a French farming community. As Otto drove past the area, a small sign nailed to an elm trunk announced its name—BUDDING GROVE. Sophie saw a sway-backed gray horse standing among the half-built structures.

“There’s the architect,” she said.

Flynders was on neither the ocean nor the bay so the rents for the old farmhouses that were still available were less than those farther out on the island in the Hamptons. There was no bank; one antique shop managed by an elderly and morose homosexual, who spent his winters in Sicily; an I.G.A. market; three gas stations; a post office in a large shed that also housed a laundromat; a general store (hardware, stationery, tennis shoes in large sizes); two public telephone booths, and a narrow dark restaurant which was open the year around. Old-time summer people made a ritual stop each year to make sure the restaurant’s permanent exhibit had not been removed from its window—a plastic piece of apple pie, on top of which decayed from year to year a yellow scoop of Styrofoam.

Once, Flynders had been a town, a center for the neighboring farms. Most of the farmland, abandoned and neglected, had reverted to marsh and had once been a halting place for a myriad of birds. Every summer house had, still, in cupboard or basket or bookcase, worn copies of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds. Then the village people had called in the mosquito-control people. Now there were few birds, and poison ivy and Virginia creeper flourished in the acid earth. The elm blight had destroyed those trees not already harmed by frequent droughts. But in the center of the village, three copper beeches survived, black in the noonday sun, purple in the twilight. Even the villagers prized them, not so rapturously as the summer people, perhaps. One manor house remained unoccupied and unsold. It sat on a small rise, a menacing, ugly house, a barrow, deposited and deserted by some 1920’s millionaire and left there to testify to the power of money to create a permanent and quarrelsome unloveliness.

A few young people lived in Flynders, commuting many miles to work in distant towns. They lived in houses which they had bought, off the highway, green or blue or pink boxes stacked up into rooms over two-car garages, with Venetian blinds at the windows. A real-estate agent in Riverhead handled the Flynders rentals and sales.

The Bentwoods’ house, a small Victorian farmhouse sitting neatly in the middle of a meadow, was a mile north of the village. Otto had placed around it a low picket fence, not because they had close neighbors, but because he had been compelled by his sense of order to distinguish between what belonged immediately to the house and what belonged to the open fields. From their porch, they could see the barn Otto had bought, which was two meadows away to the east. The little fence had made Sophie restless and she had begun, two summers before, to plant flowers outside it. She was a good gardener, but not a passionate one. She had not the long patience required for ordering a landscape. When something did not survive the summer, she lost interest in it and would not try again.

Otto turned onto their dirt road. The mailbox was lopsided on its wooden post. Ahead of them was the house, its shutters closed, a wicker stool they had forgotten to store, upside down on the porch. The ground was hummocky, denuded-looking, gray. In the summer, the grass was cut by a local man who sold the hay to a stable in Southampton. In one of the leafless maples near the house, a hive-shaped nest from last summer hung like a tumbleweed. They walked up the brick path, Sophie seeing from the corner of her eye a pair of green cotton gloves half-buried in the hard soil near where bee balm grew.

“I forgot the lunch,” Otto said, and handed her the key to the back door. She looked first into the kitchen window. Sunlight lay on the floor, touching the maple runners of the rocking chair. She felt a wave of pure happiness.

The cold inside, the chill of a house empty for many months, had a strange softness to it, faintly suggestive of anesthetic. Sophie walked slowly toward the counter, noting with pleasure an assortment of kitchen toys, most of which were duplicates of those she had in Brooklyn. She picked up a round tin box and shook it to hear the rattle of the cooky cutters inside, then recalled suddenly the face of a summer friend of theirs, a painter who had visited them frequently in August. She recalled how he had picked up each gadget on this counter and held it close to his face, tracing its shape with his fingers and how, when he arrived, he washed his hands in the kitchen sink, using the yellow kitchen soap. She had liked him very much, liked his substantial, handsome face, the way the skin of his hands had gleamed beneath the water from the tap, the way he’d nudge things with the unself-conscious and sober curiosity of a child or an especially alert animal. He had, she remembered thinking, a certain kind of self-love, the kind that comes from poverty, perhaps, having nothing else to love. He was very poor, except for ex-wives, of which he had several, and he had many theories of how to manage a life which he described with the calm zealotry of one who has received truths from the sun. He didn’t smoke or drink—a little peyote now and then—and as he sat down to one of Sophie’s dinners, he would groan in mock horror at the dissipation he was about to indulge in. He hardly ever cooked food any more, he said, and had nearly succeeded in giving up meat and fish. So she had said to him self-consciously that she wished she could give up smoking, but guessed her inability was a “failure of character,” and she had been shocked by his mockery when he parroted her voice, making it high and fatuous: “Failure of character, failure of character,” he had chirped and laughed at her. When she’d quit cigarettes in the fall, she’d dropped him a note—he’d gone off to spend the winter in some Vermont barn—telling him that her character was improving, but he had never answered her. She was thinking of him now, she realized suddenly, because she was staring at what remained of the object he had liked most, a bottle shaped like a bunch of grapes that had held wine vinegar and which was now lying in fragments on the counter and all around it, stains in the wood where the vinegar had soaked in. She frowned, turned rapidly away from the counter. The pantry door was open, and lying spilled on the floor was a large box of coarse salt, canned goods, a broom plucked of its straws.

She dropped purse and book in the rocking chair and ran through the living room to the front door, which she unlocked and flung open just as Otto took the first step to the porch.

“Someone’s been in the house.”

He set the straw basket down. “Here?” And as astonishment gave way to helpless anger, he repeated “Here” without emphasis or surprise, as though he’d learned all he needed to know in half a minute.

Whoever it was had gotten through the first floor bedroom. The window had been smashed, the shutter torn from its hinges. From the foam-rubber mattress which had been dragged to the floor, the handle of a French chopping knife still protruded. The caning of the dining room chairs had been slashed, sea shells ground to dust on the floor, lamps broken, the Paisley fabric of the couch cover torn into strips, cushions gutted, and over every painting or photograph a giant X had been drawn with barn paint. Upstairs in the bathroom lay a decomposed catbird in the tub, and talcum powder, aspirin, disinfectant, and mouthwash had been emptied on the floor. Clothes had been dragged out of closets and cut crazily with scissors. Books had been torn in half. In the dining room, Sophie found an empty bottle of bourbon beneath the table.

Soon they stopped exclaiming; they picked up things, examined them and dropped them wordlessly. Otto held up the stomped spine of a book for Sophie to observe; Sophie showed him a shard of the Bennington-ware pitcher. He began to right the furniture, to sweep up the broken glass with cardboard backing from a picture. Sophie stacked the canned soups in the pantry and brought the broom handle and head into the living room. Might as well burn it. They met in front of the fireplace where, among the heaped up paperback mysteries and magazines, a hummock of dried feces sat like a rotting toad.

“There must have been more than one,” Sophie said.

“A battalion,” Otto said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“We can’t leave it—”

“No, no…we’ll go get Mr. Haynes. That bastard. He must have known about this.”

They didn’t bother to lock the doors.

Haynes lived a few miles away. He was the Flynders caretaker. He had once had a small potato farm, but it had failed in 1953, and since, by then, Flynders had begun to wake from its thirty-year sleep, during which time it had declined insensibly from town to village and become a summer colony, Haynes made himself useful to the city people. He opened their houses on Memorial Day and closed them in September, and sometimes turned on heat and water for their winter vacations. He also worked as a kind of unofficial contractor, hiring people to do the various odd jobs that turned up.

The Haynes property looked as if it had been assembled by a centrifuge. The house, a gnomish conglomerate pieced together with a variety of materials, actually left the ground at its northeast corner and although, if one stooped, one could see timbers and planks wedged in under the floor, the illusion of imminent collapse was powerful.

Three vehicles in varying stages of deterioration stood on three wheels, on two, on none, in a line more or less directed toward a shed shelter, as though they’d been struck down just before they reached their goal. Only the Ford truck looked as if it might still run. Rubber tires leaned against every surface. Cans, tools, pails, lengths of hose, rusted grills, and summer furniture were spread out in front of the house, presenting a scene of monkeylike distraction—as though each object had been snatched up and then dropped, a second’s forgetfulness erasing all memory of original intention. A clothesline was strung across the porch and from it hung a few limp rags. A bicycle with twisted handlebars lay against the steps. And from a small chimney black smoke poured as if, inside the house, the inhabitants were hurriedly burning up still more repellent trash before it drowned them.

As the Bentwoods got out of the car, a huge, seemingly jointless dog bounded toward them from behind the house, dropped to the ground at their feet and rolled over, waving its floppy legs. When Otto stepped aside, muttering, “My God!” the dog moaned joyfully and sprang to its feet. The door on the porch opened, and Mr. Haynes poked out a narrow unshaven face.

“Get outa there, Mamba!” he shouted at the dog. “Why, hello there, Mr. Bentwood, and Mrs…. What are you folks doing out here in the backwoods this time of year? Don’t tell me summer has climbed up and sneaked in and I didn’t even know about it!”

“Hello, Mr. Haynes,” said Otto frigidly.

As they stepped uneasily on the rickety boards of the porch, Mr. Haynes slid his head out a little farther and frowned. “Don’t let that dog get in,” he said. “She’s in her season. Too big to let in the house. Go take a seat, Mamba. She don’t mind the damp with that coat on her.”

He opened the door to let them into the house. “Another present from you summer people,” he said, smiling wolfishly. “Found her on the beach over at the bay, dragging around a dead sea gull. You people and your animals! Gawd! If I kept all the ones got left out here, I’d have a zoo.”

Neither Sophie nor Otto had ever set foot in the Haynes’ house before. The first thing they saw, on the wall near the door, was a huge ring hung with keys and tacked up next to it, a long list of names and telephone numbers on a piece of yellow paper.

In this dark damp parlor, where they were standing, there was an extraordinary number of small bookcases piled up, as in a warehouse. Whatever Mr. Haynes’ income was, he evidently augmented it with the leavings of the summer people.

“Nice little parlor,” he said, “but let’s go out to the kitchen. That’s where we spend our time in the cold weather. It’s friendly and warm in there and country folks do love their kitchens.”

Sitting around the kitchen table like collapsed sacks of grain were Mrs. Haynes and the three Haynes children, two boys in their late teens, and a girl a few years younger. The girl was immensely fat. From beneath a tangle of burnt-looking fairish hair, she was staring down at a copy of Life magazine, her mouth open.

“Now, here’s Duane and Warren,” cried Mr. Haynes gaily. “Believe you met them once before when we fixed up your porch. And that’s Connie, the glamour girl, over there. And of course you know Mrs. Haynes here. These are the Bentwoods, Toddy, in case you don’t remember. They’ve got the old Klinger place.”

“Take a seat,” said Mrs. Haynes sternly. “Don’t stand there like that. We’re glad to have you.”

Since there were no extra chairs, Sophie and Otto continued to stand in the doorway, until, a moment later, the combined smell of dog and roast meat and hair and skin, cigarette and wood smoke, so overwhelmed them, they stepped backward into the parlor. Mr. Haynes, perhaps attributing their retreat to refinement on their part, cried, “Don’t be shy, folks! We’re here for all the world to see!” and, taking each of the Bentwoods by an arm, shoved them forcibly back into the kitchen. No one, during Mr. Haynes’ declaration, had stirred. Then, at some signal from his father, Duane rose and stretched, squeezed past Otto and Sophie and returned shortly with two straight-backed chairs. He waited with insulting patience for them to move aside so he could smack the chairs down on the kitchen floor.

The Bentwoods’ preoccupation with the violence done to them temporarily abated as they confronted the scene of frowzy intimacy before them. The heat from a huge black stove, across the front of which was written Iron Duke, could have warmed up the whole outdoors. Remains of the Sunday meal were spread out on the oilcloth-covered table. Both boys were smoking, and they continued to smoke all the time Sophie and Otto were there, as though in a vicious contest to see who would get the last Pall Mall from the pack that lay on the table next to a dish of pickles.

Connie announced, “I’m gonna watch the TV.”

“You wait till we finish talking with the Bentwoods,” said Mr. Haynes, scowling at her, then smiling broadly at Otto, as though his daughter’s sullenly stated intention was an example of her charm. But Connie ignored her father. She reached across her mother to the television set which sat amid a welter of laundry on top of a new-looking washing machine. Mrs. Haynes smacked her outstretched hand.

“They don’t do a thing you say,” Mrs. Haynes said complacently. “All alike, this new generation.”

“Now, Toddy, we was just the same,” said Mr. Haynes, leering at Sophie. “And we know what they want because we was young once ourselves. Right?”

“Someone got in our house and smashed up everything,” Otto said loudly.

Duane and Warren straightened up and regarded the Bentwoods with real interest, as though at last they saw some purpose in their existence. Even Connie stopped pouting and fixed her slightly protuberant eyes on their faces. Mr. Haynes’ mouth twitched and his nose reddened.

“Oh, my!” said Mrs. Haynes.

“Well, imagine!” cried her husband. “I can hardly believe it. We haven’t had anything like that happen around here. It’s different out on the shore where you get all that city riffraff. But, here…Why, Tom is supposed to do a weekly check on the summer places. Isn’t he, Toddy? You know, Tom the state trooper, don’t you, Mr. Bentwood? We just saw him last week, and he was saying how quiet it is in Flynders, what a relief it was to come to our little village. No crime around here. Right, boys? I said, right?”

Duane snickered and ground out his cigarette in his plate, instantly taking another. “Right, Daddy,” said Warren.

“I’ll go call Tom,” Haynes said. “He’s off today. Still, he can just get his butt out there to your place. We’ll take care of this situation.”

“Did they steal any valuables?” asked Mrs. Haynes, looking at Sophie intently.

“Nothing seems to be missing,” she answered. “They just wrecked what was there.”

“It might be kids, you know,” Mr. Haynes offered in a somewhat sorrowful voice, “after liquor. You summer people leave all that liquor around, you know. It’s just too damn much for some young folks. You people come and go. But they have to stay. See what I mean? Right, boys?” He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water. Mrs. Haynes absently tore off a piece of meat from the roast, which had cooled in its fat, and stuffed it into her mouth. Connie went back to her magazine.

“All right, folks. Let’s go look at the damage,” said Haynes. “Warren, when are you going to take that goddamn Caddie to the bone yard? I can’t get the Chevy out of the shed with that thing lying there across the road.”

“You can back it around like you always do,” Warren snapped. “There’s lots of things I want to take out of that wagon still. You said yourself this morning that there’s a lot we can use in it.”

Mr. Haynes shrugged helplessly. “Don’t do a thing their father says,” he told Otto. “No respect.” And he smiled.

“We’ll drive you back,” Otto offered. “We’d like to get to it.”

“Let me call Tom,” said Haynes. He stood up and took a short leather jacket from a peg on the wall. “I haven’t been out yet today. But it don’t look cold. Is it?” Otto shook his head, then said “No” in a choked voice. Haynes left the room. Mrs. Haynes stared at the dirty dishes. Duane began to tap a glass with a spoon.

“Stop that noise!” cried Mrs. Haynes angrily. He gave her a fierce look and went to the back door, cursing it when the lock jammed, then yanking it open and slamming it behind him.

“We’ll wait in the car,” said Otto in Mrs. Haynes’ direction. She nodded indifferently and then heaved a massive sigh. “Help me clear, Connie,” she said. Connie shook her head, but her mother yanked her to her feet. As Sophie looked back, she saw mother and daughter laboriously removing dirty plates from the table.

“Tom’ll meet us in half an hour,” announced Mr. Haynes, fighting off the frantic embrace of Mamba as he got into the back seat of the Mercedes. He apologized elaborately for the dog as he shoved her out onto the ground, and then for his dirty boots. He seemed to suggest that the Bentwoods really would have preferred him to run along behind the car. Otto cut short his apologies by enumerating the damages to the house. When they drove into the yard, Sophie experienced an intense reluctance to go back into the house, but once inside, she felt a kind of lassitude.

Tom, the trooper, arrived in half an hour as he had promised. He was dressed nattily in civilian clothes, his hair was slicked down, his face clean-shaven, his expression bland and his voice impersonal.

“Could have been anyone,” he said, after he had looked around. “There’s been a lot of this kind of stuff these last few years. Kids, usually. They often don’t take anything, maybe a radio or something little they can carry. Do you have a radio? No? And you can’t find anything missing? Well, I don’t suppose they’d have much use for what you’ve got in here.” He waved his hand at the living room as though by his own estimate of the wreckage, there couldn’t have been anything of much value.

“They’re running wild these days,” he said. “We got our hands full with drug takers, and the hippies from the city that hole up out here for the winter. One couple—you wouldn’t believe it—they lived in someone’s old barn for two months before we spotted them. They’re not as dumb as they look, you know. These two knew our routine and when we came around to check up on the property, there wasn’t a sign of life.”

“No!” exclaimed Mr. Haynes. “You mean, a boy and a girl?”

“That’s right,” said Tom. “We might never have got them if they hadn’t taken in some stray dog that set up a howl when we parked the car near the barn.” Then he took care of official culpability by telling the Bentwoods he’d just been around to check on their house the week before. “Everything looked okay then,” he said. “We didn’t find any broken windows or anything.” Sophie thought about the catbird. It had been dead a long time, and it wouldn’t, in any case, have been flying around the house in dead winter. She glanced at Tom’s impassive face. Perhaps he didn’t even know he had lied; perhaps he only recognized a lie when it was refuted.

“But there is a dead bird in the tub,” she said in a low, unsteady voice, “and it’s been dead for a while.”

Tom turned to Sophie and stared at her silently, his unblinking eyes fixed on hers. Then he said without emphasis, “We were out here last week.”

“I’ll go measure that window,” said Mr. Haynes, “and get out here first thing in the morning to fix it. I think I got a piece of glass in the shed that ought to do.” He took a round tape measure from his jacket pocket. “Look at that!” he cried happily. “I wasn’t even sure it was going to be there when I reached in.”

“What are we to do?” asked Otto. “Do we have to get bars for the windows?”

“I doubt they’ll try again,” Tom said, turning his back on Sophie. “I mean they’ve taken care of you. I’m sorry this happened. But at least, they didn’t burn the house down. We’ve had two fires out at Mascuit.”

“They burn up the whole house?” shouted Haynes from the bedroom. He walked back into the living room, trying to get the tape to roll back into its casing. “Damn thing’s busted,” he muttered.

“They burned both houses to the ground. One of the owners is in Europe and we can’t even get hold of him.” Sophie thought, or imagined, she heard a small note of satisfaction in Tom’s voice. It was hard to tell; he didn’t show much more than his bodily surface. God knows what was running around inside.

Tom departed with a belligerent shifting of gears, then Otto and Haynes got into the Mercedes and drove off.

Sophie ate half a ham sandwich and a hard-boiled egg in the kitchen, where there was less damage than in the other rooms.

Later, filling paper sacks with debris, she felt the beginning of composure. As she worked, she caught sight of the meadows through the kitchen window. The crumbling remains of an old stone wall caught the sunlight in its earth-filled crevices. She gathered up the dead bird in paper toweling and did what she could with the bathroom floor. There was no water to scrub it with. Then she found a shovel in the small basement and carried the pile of feces out behind the house and flung it as far as she could.

When Otto returned, she told him nothing had been taken except the flashlight she kept in their bedroom. And she was sure there had been very little bourbon left in the bottle she’d found beneath the table. He had gone to stand at the kitchen window and was looking out.

“What I’ll miss most, after I’m dead,” he said, “is that light in the late afternoon.”

“They might have burned the house, Otto,” she said. “It could have been much worse.”

“I’ll take out the bird and the crap,” he said.

“I did that.”

“It’s a little like flushing the toilet just before the Titanic goes down,” he said.

“We didn’t sink,” she said. “We’ve just been roughed up.”

“I wish someone would tell me how I can live,” he said, and shot her a glance. The half-question affected her unpleasantly, and she turned her head away instantly so he could not see her face. She felt the injustice of her own response—what if his words were puerile? The plea behind them was not. But she couldn’t tell anyone how to live! Maybe it would have been all right if he hadn’t looked at her—if he had cried out, forgetting self, forgetting how what he said might sound, if he had shouted, “I don’t know how to live!”

“There’s no one to say,” she said flatly.

“Maybe we should move away.”

“Where?”

“I can’t even move away. I couldn’t start up a practice at my age in Chicago, or any other place.”

“I don’t like Chicago.”

“How about Halifax?”

“It’s only furniture…”

“There isn’t any place for the way I feel.”

“Listen, Otto. It was just furniture.”

“But don’t you see how savage it is? And empty…I wouldn’t mind being shot in a revolution, or having my home burned….”

She laughed wildly. “You wouldn’t mind being shot!” she cried.

“There’d be some purpose to it,” he said stubbornly, grabbing up a mutilated sketch of the house someone had drawn for them, and flourishing it at her. “This is meaningless. It doesn’t represent an idea. It is primitive, the void…”

“Maybe it’s in a language you don’t speak—”

“Are you defending pigs who shit in your fireplace!” he demanded furiously.

“Oh, Otto,” she said, and rested her head on her arm.

“I wonder if those Haynes cretins had something to do with it. How they hate us! Did you see how gratified they were by this trouble of ours? Everything in that kitchen was just the way they wanted it, Connie, and the television set on the washing machine, and Duane straddling his chair and that 1953 calendar—it all said one thing to me. It said, die.”

She went into the living room and looked around the bare walls. All the sweet, pretty things were gone, things she had found in junk shops or picked off the ground, or bought in antique stores. Otto took care of cars and insurance policies, real estate and hotel reservations, all that. But he was not a collector.

“I suppose we’ve got insurance to cover this,” she called back to him.

“Give me a category,” he said in a bitter voice, coming to the kitchen door, still holding the sketch. “What’s it called?”

“Oh, Christ!” she exclaimed. “It’s called vandalism, and that’s all it’s called….”

They drove through the village without commenting on the familiar landmarks; the copper beeches looked dead, like stage trees, an affectation of value. Otto didn’t stop for gas until they had reached the highway, departing from his custom of giving one of the Flynders stations his business.

The parkway drugged her. The car went up and down ramps like a mechanical toy at the end of a metal arm. It was midway to darkness; suddenly the lights came on. Then gradually, in the pale emptiness of her mind, there was a flush of memory. She had felt something like this once before, during the year after Francis had gone back to Locust Valley. Then, as now, a debilitating fatigue had overcome her. She had suffered slight but persistent fevers. Noel had shot her full of vitamin B-12 and bluntly suggested a consultation with a psychiatric colleague. She’d refused, coming out of her stupor long enough to say to Noel that as it was she couldn’t bear to think about herself. She had lost weight, grown haggard, idle, and indifferent. She sat up violently, hitting her arm against the door. She didn’t want that emptiness…

“What’s the matter?” Otto asked.

“Nothing.”

He spoke to her again, but she didn’t understand him. He looked over at her. “I said, perhaps we’d better try to think about adopting a child again. Didn’t you hear me?”

“All right.”

“All right! Is that how you feel?”

“You’ve no right to ask me that. I exhausted feeling about that subject a long time ago. When I wanted to do it, you behaved as though I’d asked you to get me a harvester.”

“Well, I’m thinking about it differently.”

“I don’t believe you’re serious. If I thought you were serious…”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know….”

“Take my hand!” he demanded suddenly, and held his hand out toward her. She hesitated, then reached across herself with her right hand, and gripped his in it. He held it for a second.

“Is the bite still bothering you? I thought it was okay.”

“It’s still tender.”

“Did you take those pills?”

“I forgot, out there.”

“That’s over, at least.”

“Not yet. When will they kill the cat?”

They were going through Queens now, but in the dark, picked at feebly by the lights, it was only a series of roads.

“After they’ve examined it,” he said.

“They don’t keep it—well, I know it would be after they examined it, Otto. I mean, do they keep it for a week or a day or two, in case someone might take it?”

“That old brute? Who would take it?”

“Can you stay home tomorrow until noon?”

“Why do you persist in thinking they’re going to call you?”

“There’s always a chance they might.”

“All right, then!” he exploded angrily. “Then you’ll have the shots, fourteen of them, and they’ll hurt, and possibly, they won’t even work!”

She felt immensely cheered by his outburst.

“You don’t understand,” she said, almost gratefully. “It’s what’s behind it that bothers me.”

“We’ve had a few bad days. There’s nothing behind anything. What in God’s name do you want? Do you want Charlie to murder me? Do you wish the farmhouse had been burned down? Do you wish that Negro man had killed us? And a bullet to have lodged itself in Mike Holstein’s wall instead of a rock on the floor? Do you want to be rabid?”

“But, by extension, everything you say could have come true! One more step, one more minute—”

“But it didn’t!” he shouted, driving jerkily and fumbling with the shift stick. “God, I went through a red light!”

“Can’t you take the morning off?”

“No,” he said harshly. “Especially not now.”

“Especially now!”

“I have to be there. If I let go now, it’ll be a disaster. Sophie—” he cried importunately, “it’s all I know.”

After a while, she said, “Never mind what I say.”

“I can’t,” he replied quietly. “I don’t and I can’t.”

She made supper for them while he went through his insurance file. After they’d eaten, they made a list of the repairs they would have to make, and what they’d have to replace. “All those beds,” said Otto. “Why did they slash away so at those?” They’d have to let Haynes continue as caretaker. If they hired someone else, Haynes would do them in somehow.

“I noticed you hesitated to go in after I unlocked the door when we got home,” Otto said.

“I had some morbid image,” she said. “I thought they might have been here, too.”

“Not yet,” he said.

They read very late, sitting up in bed against pillows and drinking glasses of red wine. As usual, Otto fell asleep first.

The house creaked quietly to itself in the dark. Around three o’clock, an east wind blew down the street, moving the stiff young branches of the maple trees. A small gray mouse ran from beneath the Bentwood refrigerator, across the kitchen floor, and out to the dining room, where it wedged itself beneath an armoire in which Sophie kept the table linen.

It must have heard something that frightened it, for it jammed itself still farther under the armoire, to a point where the old cedar floor planking had buckled, then it could not back out. The white-and-gray cat watched the telephone wires and tree branches which the wind had stirred into movement. It balanced itself with habitual ease on the narrow ledge of a fence crosspiece. The man who lived in the house across the Bentwood back yard, rose, stumbled to the window, and relieved himself. The cat blinked and cocked its head, listening to the splatter of water on the Victorian garden path. The man collapsed back into bed. On the next floor, a small infant awoke and began to cry. It cried for a long time by itself in the wet dark, its belly and buttocks twisting and straining, the sheer force of its wails lifting the small trunk up and down like a pump. The father got up from his bed and crossed the room to the crib, where he stood looking down into it. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he saw the vertical movement of the infant’s body. He did nothing; his hands hung at his sides, motionless. His T-shirt fell to just below his navel, and he was conscious of the wind which blew through cracks in the window, where the plastic had torn loose from the tacks. The wind chilled his genitals and thighs, and he curved his hands in front of himself, making a kind of nest for his penis. He continued to observe his bawling son, holding his crotch in his hands. The baby often woke at this time of morning, and the father would often come and observe him in this way. He didn’t know what his wife did, or thought, when it was she who came to the crib. Tonight she had not stirred. All at once, the child’s wailing died away completely. A familiar odor drifted up from the now relaxed and motionless body. “All that for a shit!” the father muttered to himself in Spanish. “What a scandalous life it is….”

The baby’s cry had awakened Otto. He stared into the dark, listening to that distant squeal that was so like a cat’s. By the time it suddenly stopped, he was thoroughly awake. He turned and saw the dark mass of Sophie’s hair on the sheet beside him. She’d pushed the pillow off the bed in her sleep. He sniffed at her hair. There was a faint trace of the perfume she always wore, but it floated on a rather stronger chemical smell. That monstrous bottle he had given her had probably turned to alcohol. Next birthday, he would buy her three small bottles instead. He could tell by her breathing that her mouth was open against the sheet. He touched her hair. It was thick, strong, lively hair. The nape of her neck was warm, faintly damp where her hair was silkier, more tender somehow. He nestled his hand there, beneath the heavy mass; his hand seemed to be his whole self, hiding in the dark. She grumbled once, but he ignored her complaint. She was lying on her stomach. He grasped her shoulder and pulled her toward him until she sunk against him. He began to push up her short nylon gown. He knew she must be awake. But he would not speak her name. He would not say anything at all. Sometimes, over the years, that had happened, his not wanting to talk to her. It didn’t mean he was angry. But sometimes, after a movie or a play or the company had gone home, he simply didn’t want to talk to her. It was a very deep feeling, a law of his own nature that, now and then, had to be obeyed. He loved Sophie—he thought about her, the kind of woman she was—and she was so tangled in his life that the time he had sensed she wanted to go away from him had brought him more suffering than he had conceived it possible for him to feel.

He pressed his hand down flat on her hip. Still she said nothing. He was suddenly angry, but he realized, as he maintained his own stubborn silence, it was not because of sexual disappointment so much as an exasperation similar to what he felt when he had to grab her arm to make her keep up with him when they walked together down a street.

He tightened his grip on her hip and turned her toward him, and as she sank below him on her back he saw by a faint glimmer of street light shining through the cracks in the window shutters, the dark smudges of her closed eyes. Then, with no ceremony and perversely gratified by the discomfort he was inflicting on them both, he entered her. When he withdrew, after an orgasm of an intensity he had not expected, he had the fleeting thought that his sudden impulse had had little to do with sensuality.

She stirred slightly, then shifted to her side, drew up her legs and pushed her back up against him.

“Oh, well…” she murmured.

“Sorry,” he whispered, then was choked by a wave of laughter.

He’d got her that time.