S*E*V*E*N

The Willow Pool

My name is Mabel Turner. Mrs. Ralph Turner. I guess it is my fault the girl ever stayed here on the place. We have three hundred acres of apple trees. It is land my father and my grandfather used to own. We are just about midway between Watkins Glen and Ithaca. We raised three children here. They all went to Cornell, and they are all married and live farther away than I would like. But I am ever grateful we got them through college and out into the world before all this rioting and drugs started, before they all began to look alike in their funny clothes and long hair.

A few years ago we used to have an apple stand out front by the state road. But it was more nuisance than it was worth. My husband built it the way he builds everything, very strong and tight, out of the best materials.

When we decided to give up the apple stand, I said it might make a nice little cabin. My husband Ralph jacked it up and put it on a flatbed wagon and tractored it up through the west orchard and over the knoll and down to the bank of Cold Creek, to a pretty place I picked. He built a fieldstone foundation and put the apple stand on it.

We decided that there wasn’t much point in putting a lot of money in it. It was only eighteen feet long and ten feet wide. It has a shed roof. Ralph left the big shutters on, two of them, permanently propped up, and put sliding windows and screens in the two openings. He put some panel board on the studs on the inside and built a bunk bed, put blue asphalt tile on the floor, and built three steps up to the doorway in the end, and put another window in the other end. We did not want to go to the expense of plumbing. Ralph ran a power line from the house back there, enough to run some lights and a little pump to pull water from the creek into a little sink inside. You have to put a pail under the drain from the sink.

I fixed up a kitchen with a little kerosene stove and a little electric refrigerator that’s very old but has always worked well. Ralph built an outdoor privy over at the edge of the marsh about sixty feet back from the cabin. I put up curtains, and we had some things stored in the top of the barn that made pretty furniture when Ralph spray-painted it.

I had him put it on the south bank of the creek about forty feet east of the willow pool. The creek runs through a shallow valley. There are old apple trees there, too old to bear properly, but they were planted by my grandfather and we have not had the heart to cut them down and put in better stock. The creek is spring fed. There is a deep pool under the shade of three old willow trees. Even in August and September the water is icy. It is always in shade.

I swam there on the hottest days of summer when I was a little girl, and so did my mother. In May the little valley is full of the sweet smell of apple blossoms.

The girl came to the door of the main house in May, early May, two years ago. I saw her little red car in the driveway. An old car, I guess. Five or six years old. A foreign car. She had seen our sign about having a cabin to rent. There were Pennsylvania license plates on her car. She wore red pants and a shaggy gray sweater. She was a little bit of a thing, with long straight black hair that she kept pushing back.

I said it was empty and she wanted to look at it. She said it was just for herself. She seemed like a quiet, polite girl. I said it did not have modern conveniences, and she said that wasn’t too important to her. I wished Ralph had been there to say no. But he was at a meeting at Cornell, where they were talking about the newest thing in orchard sprays.

I asked her how old she was and then said she didn’t look twenty. She showed me her driver’s license. Her name was Elizabeth Norris Ames, and she said everybody had always called her Norrie. She was twenty, and on the driver’s license it said she was a student. I asked her why she wasn’t in school, and she said she had had to drop out of Coulter in her senior year because of illness. She said she had her books with her, and she needed a quiet place to study and catch up. She had been out since March. She said that, if she could put in a good month of work, she could go back and they would let her take her final examinations.

I walked back with her and up the hill and down into the valley and unlocked the place for her. She thought it was wonderful, but she was looking at the trees and the creek and the pool, not the cabin. I said that, because it didn’t have conveniences, she could have it for the month of May for forty dollars if she wanted it. She gave me two twenty-dollar bills back at the house when I wrote out her receipt. I told her then that I was renting it to her alone, and it didn’t include visitors. I certainly didn’t want to find a whole crowd of them living in that little cabin, carrying on the way they do these days.

By the time Ralph got home she was all settled in. He didn’t think much of the idea. But I took him back there and introduced her, and when we walked back to the house he said that she seemed like a mannerly little person. Maybe we wouldn’t have any trouble with her, but that, he said, was a case of wait and see.

She was polite, but she wasn’t very friendly. I would wave to her when she would drive out to go to the village and do her shopping, and she would wave back. When I made some brownies I took her some, still hot, and she thanked me nicely, but she gave me the feeling she’d rather I didn’t come calling. She said there wasn’t a thing she needed. I saw that she had her books and notebooks opened up all over the table, and she had some of that music they like these days playing over a little black radio standing on the shelf over the bunk bed, but not loud.

Maybe everything would have been all right if I hadn’t gone down there to the cabin that one Thursday afternoon, the twentieth day of May, as I recall. I was taking a Coleman lantern to loan her. I got a call from the power company that they had to change something or other around and they were going to cut off the power at six o’clock at night and turn it back on at six the next morning. I thought it might be scary for her to be all alone in the dark like that and not knowing what had happened, so it was a Christian favor I thought to do for her.

As I came around the end of the cabin I thought I heard a man laugh, and because I didn’t want to walk in on her if she had company, I stepped up onto a cinder block and looked through the end window. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, I’d say, and there she was, bold as brass, naked as an egg, her and the boy too, making love in a way no decent woman ever would, right on that bunk bed. I could see that he was just a young boy, maybe sixteen years old, stretched out flat on his back, and she was mounted on him, sitting up straight, or squatting, sort of, holding his hands for balance, and churning away with her narrow little hips. The two of them were giggling and chuckling. It was a dirty, shameless performance. That young boy wore his hair as long as a girl.

The boy looked beyond her and noticed me staring in and said something to her and she stopped whatever they call that trick she was doing and snapped her head around. With the two of them staring at me I stepped back off the cinder box and twisted my ankle. Not badly, but enough to give me a twinge.

“What do you want, Mrs. Turner?” she called in one of those social voices like you hear in the movies and on TV. I didn’t answer, and she called out the same question again.

By then I had an answer, and I made her hear me! I said I wanted her out of the cabin and off the property in an hour. I said when she packed and drove out she’d find an envelope in our RFD box with her forty dollars in it.

She called to me again in that same voice. “Thank you, Mrs. Tinner. You’re very kind. Good-bye, Mrs. Turner.”

Then I heard them giggling again in there.

I watched at the window and when she drove out she had the boy in her little red car beside her. She didn’t even glance toward the house. And she didn’t stop at the mailbox. I went and got the money back out and then I went down to the cabin. I have to say, in all fairness, that she left it all spick-and-span, just as nice or nicer than when she moved in.

By the time Ralph came back from the village, I had decided there was no point in going into it. It would only upset him. So I said that the girl got word from home that she had to hurry back, and she’d said to say good-bye to him too. It was easier that way. In spite of all the years we’ve been married, I don’t really see how I could have brought myself to explain to Ralph just what I saw them doing. I don’t like dirty talk.

I never thought I would ever see her again, not in my lifetime. But it just goes to show you that some people are absolutely brazen and shameless. What did she expect me to do when she came back here two years later? Hug her and kiss her? Pin a medal on her? I did what I had to do.

My name is Wyndam Harger. Dr. Wyndam Harger. I receive an annual retainer from Coulter College, the girl’s school where Elizabeth Norris Ames was a third-year student up until early March two years ago. My office is three blocks from the campus.

I was summoned on an emergency basis and arrived at the small infirmary at six o’clock on Monday morning, March third. The Ames girl had been brought in an hour earlier. I was told that one of the girls in the dormitory had been awake and had seen a car stop in front of the dormitory and had seen the Ames girl ejected forcibly from the vehicle. It had then driven off at a high rate of speed. The Ames girl had walked a short distance and had then fallen onto the grass. The girl had awakened her roommate, and the two of them had taken the Ames girl to the infirmary, awakening the trained nurse on duty and reporting to her that the Ames girl had been absent from the campus and from classes for perhaps ten days.

I examined the patient. She was semiconscious and uncommunicative. I could find no specific indications of drug abuse. I could find no indications of sexual assault or serious trauma of any kind. She was emaciated. Her color was bad, and she showed the classic symptoms of malnourishment. There were some contusions on her hips and thighs and breasts, overlapping bruises acquired over a period of time, according to the coloration of the bruises. The pattern and the dispersion of the bruises were such that I found it reasonable to assume they were the result of strenuous copulation with a male either very muscular or of sadistic tendency.

Her body was rather immature for a female of twenty. Pulse and respiration were slow. Blood pressure was down. Reflexes were below norm. There was minor anemia. The white count was within limits. Temperature was slightly subnormal.

To me the most indicative symptom of what was probably wrong with her was her refusal to answer any question, her determination to keep her eyes shut tightly, and her tendency to curl into the foetal position.

I had the choice of recommending treatment there, of asking that they call for psychiatric diagnois, that they take her forty miles into Boston to a hospital, or that they contact her parents in the Philadelphia area to come and take the girl home for all necessary medical attention.

I recommended the final course, as it seemed to me to be in the best interests of the patient. I suspected that it was an emotional disturbance, and probably severe. We have seen a fourfold increase in such disturbances among the young in recent years, and I believe that only a small percentage of that increase is due to experimentation with the mind-distorting drugs. With increasing numbers of us, there seems to be a kind of brutality of indifference, a loss of identifiable goals, a dubiousness about any kind of social or emotional ethic, which creates a climate requiring more survival strength than our more imaginative and sensitive young people possess. The pattern seems to be a sense of isolation and meaninglessness which demands of the young person increasingly bizarre behavior and eccentric social activities. Out of this identity quest comes a kind of wildness which eventually results in some deep and lasting violation of self-image. And then the next step is a fragmentation of personality and a withdrawal from reality.

A year ago at a dinner party a colleague brought up the idea that, inasmuch as the hard pesticides are in the fatty tissues of all of us to a degree which would render us inedible were we a cannibal nation, a certain amount might well get past the blood-brain barrier, enough to be revealed by quantitative and qualitative analysis of macerated brain tissue. He said that it is, after all, a nerve poison. He suggested that those of us who have achieved an emotional stability and a stable identity might be immune to the nerve-poison effects on our thought processes or might be influenced only to the point of having repressible urges to indulge in freakish, senseless behavior. The young, however, still involved in identity searches, in search of understandable and relevant ethics, might be far more susceptible to the influence of such poison. Then, of course, they would have the very human need to find a justification for their erratic, violent, meaningless acts, and would cast about and decide that their chemical-induced idiocies and self-destructive tendencies were in reality merely rebellion against the Establishment.

At the time I thought it an amusing mental game. But lately I am beginning to wonder if it might be useful to our society were a foundation grant given to explore that possibility, if only to eliminate it as a possible cause of those actions which of late are becoming even more incomprehensible to the participants themselves.

At any rate, the administration at Coulter was reluctant to send for the parents. Administrations are caught in a curious trap these days. The student body demands permissiveness because they claim a basic human right to do what they wish to do with themselves. The school takes the money of the parents and has an implied obligation to protect student victims not only from student predators but from the predators outside the borders of the campus. Just a few years ago there would have been a great hue and cry had the Ames girl been missing from her dormitory overnight. But ten days had passed without any alarm being sounded, any search instituted. When you give children the rights, freedoms, and responsibilities of adults, a higher attrition rate is the inevitable result. One need only imagine the analogy of a kindergarten group demanding the right to cross the busy highway at any time and in any manner and at any place they might desire.

The human race does not suddenly become brighter or more aware or more mature in one generation any more than would a single generation of horses, crickets, or penguins make some vast evolutionary step without warning.

These children are more glib because they have grown up in an audiovisual world. They are more articulate, because this has been encouraged in all their waking hours. A glibness, an expanded vocabulary, a knowledge through electronic transmission of what Cairo and New Delhi look like, is merely an expansion of an ability to communicate. The basics of what to communicate remains unchanged. Amplification and diversity of input can mean amplification and diversity of output. But the processing of the data is not improved. Maturation is not enhanced. The effect can be a spurious simulation of higher intelligence or earlier maturity, which then imposes the responsibilities of the fraudulent condition upon the individual. And more of them break, as did the Ames girl.

One might even argue that instant and massive communications plus an increasing compulsion to herd together might well reduce both intelligence and maturity.

I ordered and supervised tube-feeding of the patient, gave her massive vitamin injections, and dictated a note to go with her, on her departure, for the information of her doctors.

In such cases one cannot make any prognosis without a great deal more knowledge than I possessed two years and more ago. I can express a personal and unprofessional conviction, however, that no young person comes out of such episodes unmarked. They can learn to survive in the world on the basis of a series of accommodations, provided they are brought back from the dangerous area of withdrawal.

But, like soldiers home from the wars after surviving wounds that used to always be fatal, they cannot exist again on the same plane and in the same context as the rest of us.

As I am not qualified in the fields of psychiatry and clinical psychology, it would be presumptuous of me to pass any opinion on the treatment she was given, on the way she was handled. I would only say this, that it is not at all surprising to me that it all ended so sadly and tragically.

My name is Amelia Ames. Mrs. Jonathan Ames. Norrie is my middle child, my only daughter. We have always lived near Paoli, my husband’s people and mine. There have been people named Norris and people named Ames in this area for two hundred years.

When the people at Coulter phoned us and told us over two years ago that Norrie was not well, that she seemed to be in a state of nervous exhaustion, I found it most irritating that I could not speak to her on the telephone. We were having perfectly horrible March weather, and both Jonathan and myself had engagements we could not easily break. It did not seem feasible to either fly to Boston or drive up.

So I phoned Corrine Hallowill in Cambridge and asked her if it would be too much trouble for her to go over to Coulter and give me some sort of report on Norrie. She was glad to do it. We were roommates at Smith, and though we do not see each other as often as we would like, we exchange letters often.

Corrine phoned me back at cocktail time, just as we were dressing to go to the club. She was hesitant at first and then she finally told me that Norrie was actually in frightful shape. But I had to press her for several minutes before she finally said it seemed to be some kind of complete mental breakdown. Why couldn’t those people at the school have told me that in the first place?

Once I learned some of the ugly details, I could understand why they were concerned only with having my daughter taken off their hands. Certainly they were quite conscious of their culpability in the whole affair. They could have kept far better track of my daughter. Apparently her erratic behavior began when she went back there after her Christmas vacation at home.

We did not notice anything out of the ordinary about Norrie during the Christmas holidays. She seemed happy. And quite healthy. I might say that we did not pay as much attention to the children that Christmas as we had in prior years. Jonathan and I were under severe emotional strain. We were trying to pretend to our friends and our relatives and our children that everything was well between us. But Jonathan had managed to get himself seriously involved with that wretched Warrington woman. Tom Warrington died suddenly of heart disease that summer, and Phyllis had prevailed upon Jonathan to advise her regarding the readjustment of the portfolio of securities Tom had left her in the marital trust. I suspect that there were more meetings than necessary. In the beginning she perhaps invented excuses for asking him to call and explain things to her. And later I imagine he came up with his share of imaginary necessities.

We had both always liked Tom but thought Phyllis a bit of an ass, quite attractive in a brassy fashion, a horsewoman of great ability, and a spendid sailor and tennis player. But inclined to have the one drink too many, to be too loud in public places, and to use the usual four-syllable words too often.

About two weeks before Christmas we were at a large dinner party at the Gordons’, and we had brought Phyllis with us and were to take her home. I happened to be looking in a mirror when Jonathan helped her on with her wrap, and I saw that kind of caress that a man never gives a woman unless he has been fornicating with her. I managed to control my reaction and waited until we were home alone before I charged him with it. At first he denied it all, being terribly indignant and hurt. But finally he confessed that for the past month he had been pouncing into bed with Phyllis Warrington at every opportunity. He said he did not know how it had started. It had just started, without warning.

I believe that at that juncture I used one of Phyllis’s four-letter words. He promised that it would never happen again. Our marriage was in real danger. We did discuss divorce, but not only would it have led to vast legal and financial complications, it would have given every mischievous bitch in the countryside enough dirty conversation to last the entire winter.

Thus when the children were home, Jonathan and I were in the process of establishing a new relationship with each other because he had defaulted on the old one. Communication is so terribly important, I think. We were both making a sincere effort to understand each other. Oddly enough, one by-product of the effort to cement the cracks in our marriage caused by his dreary infidelity was an increased physical awareness of each other, and an appetite for sexuality, which was more like the first year or two of our marriage than anything which had happened since. What I am saying is that Norrie could have been acting just a little bit oddly during those holidays and I would not have noticed it.

But I certainly would not feel we were remiss in any action we took once we knew the gravity of the situation. In matter of fact, Jonathan arranged to have Norrie brought all the way from Boston to Philadelphia by private ambulance, with a nurse in attendance. We were not actually at the hospital when she was brought in, but we were permitted a short visit after she had been settled into her room in the psychiatric wing. It was terrifying to see not the slightest glint of expression or recognition in the eyes of one’s own daughter, to see her so scrawny and lifeless.

We got the very top talent available, of course. Dr. Grenko did not try to confuse us or deceive us. He was very gentle and very honest. He said that not many years ago a young person who had withdrawn to that extent had had very little chance of ever recovering. But there were drugs now which often helped a great deal, and there were new forms of crash therapy. He would not promise he could help her. He just said that the odds were, for the first time in medical history, slightly in his favor. He said that if he could help her at least it would be a dramatic and sudden improvement.

And it was, of course. They used psychic energizer drugs to encourage communication. They put her into group therapy with other young people. They used a closed-circuit television technique to get her to understand herself. She would talk into the camera, and then it would be played back and she would watch herself.

In April she began to come home for visits, and by the middle of the month she was able to live at home and go back for treatment at Dr. Grenko’s office. I drove her until he said she was well enough to drive her own little car. The school had arranged for a student to drive it back from Massachusetts when spring vacation started, along with her personal things out of her room, and her school notebooks and texts. A lot of her nice things were missing, but I was able to control myself and not scold her. Dr. Grenko had told us to try to act perfectly natural around Norrie, with the single exception of not criticizing her.

We did our best. I think it was rude and inconsiderate of her to leave the way she did, with just that casual little note on my dressing table. I very nearly lost my patience with Dr. Grenko when he seemed delighted that she had run away. It was even more annoying when he phoned three days later to tell me that he had heard from Norrie. He said she had rented a little cottage on a farm in an apple orchard, and she seemed very happy. She told him she could concentrate on her books and catch up, maybe enough to go back in early June and take her examinations. I asked him for her address, but he said that she did not tell him where she was. I was certain he was lying to me, but I don’t know what I could have done about it.

Of course, she did not go back and take her examinations. She did not come back until September. She was brown as an Indian. She had put ten thousand miles on her little car. She had been all over the country. Her hands were a mess because my darling had actually done physical manual labor on some sort of commune thing out in Arizona. She seemed very merry and bright and gay. She did not go back to school, of course.

She did not want to stay with us, and because she had turned twenty-one and had started to receive the income from the trust, there was nothing we could do about it. She took that little apartment in Upper Darby and began to do quite well with her little pots and figurines, getting them into handicraft shows all over the area and selling them for what I thought was quite a bit of money for such strange lumpy little things.

We thought it was a blessing when she began going with Paul Warcroft and they fell in love and decided to marry. He comes from a very good family. Hazzlet and Warcroft is a very conservative and successful investment banking house. Paul and Norrie had actually been in the same dancing class when they were small. He was three years older than Norrie.

I know what happened, of course. But I cannot see where Jonathan and I were at fault. Dr. Grenko did come to see us after he had talked to Norrie, and he did say that in his opinion it would be better if she waited a bit longer before marrying. It seemed to me at the time that it was none of his business, actually. Norrie had had her trouble a couple of years earlier, and she had gotten over it nicely.

We thought it would be a blessing for Norrie to be safely and properly married to a very orderly and levelheaded young man, someone she could lean upon. And it was a lovely, lovely wedding.

My name is Kellaher Mason. People call me Kelly. I was going to Boston U. at the time I met Norrie Ames. I used to run around with some pretty heavy people. Off-campus people. I got over it. They can run you into bad trouble.

Norrie was a pistol. She was racing her motor every minute. She wasn’t on anything. She had enough energy for four people, but I didn’t really get to know her. The way it happened, two of us went out to Coulter and brought Norrie and another girl whose name I forget into town on a Friday. We went to a party late Friday night and by then I was bombed out of my skull. I had a fight with Norrie. I don’t know what it was about. Anyway, the party was in somebody’s house and it had been going on for days.

A fellow they call Mush was there. A big evil fellow. I think he had played pro ball somewhere, and I don’t know how he made a living at the time. Something about gambling, I think. He was one of the early speed freaks. If I hadn’t fought with Norrie and if I hadn’t been so smashed on wine, I probably would have started a pretty good brawl when Mush tried to leave with her. She didn’t want to go with him, particularly. But it didn’t matter to me a bit.

So they left, and it was at least ten days later I ran into Mush. It wasn’t an accident. He had been looking for me. He was upset. He said he wanted to get rid of Norrie, but he didn’t know where she belonged and he couldn’t find out. He said she was acting pretty strange. He said that he thought maybe she was dying.

It scared me because it wouldn’t be impossible for somebody to trace back and find the other girl and get a make on me as the date she had when she left Coulter. Mush took me to his place. It was a mess. Unbelievable. A cave where bears live. He said she had been talking about how the inside of her head was shrinking into a red ball with everything all tangled up inside it so she couldn’t sort it out. Then she’d stopped talking at all.

He had taken her there right from the party, and he’d been balling her for ten days and nights, going out to get food and bring it back. He had scuffed her up pretty bad. He said she hadn’t been eating much of anything. I couldn’t get any reaction out of her. I got more scared. Speed makes a person sexy. For all I knew he had busted her up inside somehow.

So we put her clothes on her and I borrowed a car and Mush carried her out after it was late and the streets were empty and put her in the front seat. I drove out to the school and let her out in front of the dormitory and got the hell out of there.

Funny thing. All the way back I was thinking of how I was going to find Mush and I was going to really pound him right down into the ground. I didn’t find him until three days later, and then I said hello and he said hello, and that was it. I’ve never seen him since. I don’t even know what his name was. Everybody called him Mush. He was close to thirty, getting a little bald. He’d lost his front teeth playing offensive guard. Six three, maybe two forty-five. I was still mad enough to take him, but I didn’t even try.

My name is Ralph Turner. It surprised me when Mabel went ahead and rented the apple stand to the little Ames girl. Mabel usually lets me make the decision on everything concerning money. I thought a single girl might be trouble, but after Mabel took me down to the creek and had me meet Norrie Ames, I decided that Mabel had used good judgment. I hadn’t expected to rent it for the month of May, so it was like finding forty dollars. She seemed like a polite little thing. She took the place on the second day of May.

It is a hard thing for me to tell what happened and how it happened. I certainly would not want Mabel to ever know anything about it. I just can’t understand what it was that happened to me that May. Let me see, I was sixty-one, forty-one long years older than that little dark-haired girl. It was an accident, I suppose.

When a person stands down there in that pretty little valley near the willow pool, there is only one part of my land you can see, other than the little ridges that hem the valley in. And that is a knoll almost a half mile west and a little north of the pool. It is almost on my property line. I left some hardwood on the knoll, some beech and birch, and on the seventh day of May — unseasonably warm it was — I walked up there to see if the wild bees were hiving in the big dead birch stub, thinking that I might get some help and try smoking them and moving them to one of my own hives down in the meadow near the house, and see if they’d take hold and settle in. I tried for a long time to spot some flying in and decided there were no hives on the knoll. I was going to go on back to the house when I remembered that some of the big old granddaddy apple trees down near the willow pool had hollow places a wild swarm might take to. So I walked on over there, and I swear I had forgotten all about the apple-stand cabin being occupied.

It was a hot day, a little before noon. I moved slowly, stopping to listen. The air was so still I thought I might hear the hum of a big hive if it wasn’t too far away from the ground. As I neared the creek I saw something I couldn’t make out for the first half second. As soon as I saw what it was, I eased back one long step so that I was behind the thick old trunk of one of the original trees. It was a girl’s legs, bent sharp at the knee, sticking up out of the grass there near the bank of the creek. The grass was maybe eight inches high but thin enough so I could see the shape of the rest of her sprawled out there in the sunshine.

I should have just moved back in a straight line, keeping the tree in the way. But I looked around the trunk, just as she sat up, looking the other way from me, and then stood up. I guess she’d had a bath in the creek, dried off, and stretched out on a yellow robe in the sunshine to get warm and get some tan.

Two years ago, that was. And I was forty-one years older than that dark-haired girl. My eldest granddaughter is about that same age. Norrie Ames stood up slow and naked not fifteen feet from me. Slim little girl, little nubbin breasts on her, but woman-built down through the slope of her belly, hips swelling out from the waist and tapering, dark-hair smudge on the little plump girl-part of her, all smooth and fine as ivory, her heavy black hair still damp, swinging as she stooped and picked up the towel.

I’ve always liked to look at young girls on the street, walking free, laughing together. They are pretty things and good to look at, like young-blooded horses, like blossoms, like all the free wild things of the world.

I was all ready to yank my head back quick if she started to turn. I told myself I was just looking at a pretty thing in the world. No harm in it. I told myself my granddaughter would look just as pretty in the sunshine standing in the green grass with the blue brook beyond and the apple blossoms all around us.

But it was a sick thing in an old man, because it was more than looking. It was wanting. It was a grinding, aching, terrible kind of wanting, because it was the way a beast wants, the way a brute wants. It made my heart thump so hard I shook with each beat. It made my breath come right off the top of my lungs so fast I had to try hard to keep my breathing quiet.

I had thought I was over that kind of feeling long ago. I had always fought to keep that feeling from rising up inside me, and at last when it stopped happening I was relieved because I did not have to have the sense of evil and shame anymore. It was not fair to Mabel to let that feeling get out of hand. She was and is a good wife to me, but she never took pleasure in the act. Maybe a little in the beginning, but not after the firstborn. I never possessed any other woman but my wife. She never denied me, but I didn’t ever want to abuse the rights of the husband, and in the spring of the year I had the habit of wearing myself down with heavy work on the place so as not to reach over to her side of the bed in the night too often, when it got to be too much for me to control.

It was a terrible thing to have it all come back like that when you think it has finally left you in peace for the rest of your life. It was a frightening thing to know that it could wake up again and be so quick and savage and needful.

She wiped her throat with the towel, and she whacked a bug that lit on the top of her thigh, and she leaned over again and picked up the robe and swung it around her shoulders. She stretched and yawned and went toward the cabin, picking her footsteps carefully because she was barefoot.

When she was gone I went back the way I came. My knees felt weak and trembly, and my body was sweaty under my clothes. I went all the way back to the hardwood knoll and found a place hidden and private and got down on my knees and prayed to the Lord to deliver me from my weakness and my sinful desires and to forgive me for lusting after the flesh of a young girl. But all the time I prayed, thinking of the words and saying them aloud, I had evil pictures in the back of my mind, of myself walking toward her and having her smile at me in a knowing way and lay down for me on the robe in the grass, spread herself for me, and take me in. I knew just how her flesh would feel under my hands, just how her sweet young mouth would taste.

So the praying did no good. I spent too long at it, and Mabel was cross about me being late to the midday meal. I guess I didn’t act like myself. I chewed and swallowed and everything had no taste. When she went over to the stove one time, she stopped behind my chair and put the back of her hand to my forehead to see if I had a fever. A lot of people had the flu that spring.

It was a kind of a fever, I guess. I woke up that night and it was all in my mind, just as sharp and clear as if I was seeing it again. In the night it scared me. Norrie was just a schoolgirl. A lot of old men get strange, and they have to put them away to keep them from harming themselves and others. I’d lived a good life, worked hard raising my kids, ran a good orchard operation. I had a good reputation all over the county and a lot of friends.

I knew I could throw it all away. The bad thing was that I wanted somehow to throw it all away. I wanted the sickness and the evil, and I wanted to take her by force. It was a feeling that was stronger than my religion and my self-respect.

I fought it as best I could. I remember at one point striking myself with my fist on the top of my thigh a dozen times, using pain to make the wanting go away. I hit so hard I had big ugly bruises for a long time, and I had to keep remembering not to limp in front of Mabel.

I had stared at the child’s naked body on the seventh day of May. The next day was overcast and windy, and the wind had an edge to it. I was grateful to God for giving me time to become strong again. The ninth of May was cloudless and cool, but there was no wind. I kept telling myself all morning that I had no reason to believe she had any set pattern of going into the pool near the middle of the day on warm days. I told myself I had the strength to stay away from there and never find out. But all that morning little electrical quivers would come out of nowhere and run up and down my body, and there would be an empty fluttering feeling in my belly. The little things I happened to see around the place would remind me of her. One smooth pale stone in Mabel’s rock garden turned into a small breast and then back into a stone. The curve of the scythe handle hanging on the peg in the shed was the same as the curve of her waist the way it went into the line of her hip. Apple branches made girl shapes in my eyes.

I told myself I would not go near the pool, and at the same time I was telling myself I had the right to go anywhere I wanted to on my own place. But at least I held off long enough, because when I looked down over the little crest into the valley I saw her in the same robe walking toward the cabin, not ten feet from the steps I built after I got it set on the fieldstone foundation.

It was like some kind of great victory to be late, to have missed staring at her flesh. But the victory feeling went away as I realized I had learned that it was her habit on the warm days to bathe in the pool. It would have been better if I had not seen her at all.

A hard wind blew all day of the tenth, so there was no victory to be won. I had to spend most of the eleventh in Ithaca with Mabel, so that did not count either. The twelfth was a hot still day, and I did not go near the valley. I started toward the valley, and I stopped and put my arms around a young apple tree as if it were a woman and I ground my forehead against the bark and sobbed and felt the tear-tickle on my cheeks. So it was a victory, and the cost of winning it was high. I felt drained and sick and old for the rest of that day.

I won again, day after day, but each time, each hot day, the margin was narrower. I had cruel dreams. I was not eating well. Mabel got on my nerves. And I finally lost my battle on the sixteenth day of May. I knew when I woke up that I was going to sneak into the valley early so as not to take any chance of missing her again. I did not care that I had become a sick, foolish, and dangerous old man. It was a necessity for me. I could not go on living otherwise.

I found the right place and moved into it at eleven fifteen. It was a nest in much deeper grass on a backslope beyond the pool. A half hour later she came from the cabin toward the pool. She was wearing the same robe. There was a boy with her, sixteen I would guess, trying without success to grow a beard. His hair was long. He wore khaki shorts. He was a slender boy, but with good shoulders and a deep chest. They were laughing and talking together. They had soap and towels.

She dropped her robe in the sunny place in the grass. He stepped out of his shorts, and they came naked into the willow pool together, yelping with the shock of the cold water. They splashed and played there, leaving soap on the icy water. They were innocent and unashamed. There was no hint of lovemaking. They were like young otters. They were part of nature, both handsome and healthy young animals. And I was a saddened and smutty old man, seeing myself as they would see me had they known I was hidden and waiting just to look upon the girl’s body again. In the time they were in the pool, perhaps ten minutes, I was cured of my dangerous illness. They hurried out, chattering and shuddering into the sunlight, snatched up their towels, and hopped about, drying themselves. He put his shorts on and they lay on the girl’s robe in the sun, she with a towel across her loins. I could not hear what they were saying to each other. I heard them giggle. He got up and trotted to the cabin and came back with two opened cans of some soft drink. I wormed my way back out of their sight. That was the last of it for me.

Though there had been no caresses, I had the feeling that they had been intimate, that the boy was staying there with her. I thought of telling Mabel, but I knew what a disaster that would be. Mabel has been a good wife to me, but there is a kind of harsh virtue about her. It is intolerance. She can be cruel and will never admit she enjoys being cruel. She works herself up to it by saying it is her Christian duty. I knew that had I told her she would have marched down there and said all manner of dirty things to them in the name of God.

I could never have made her see that if those two made their love together, it would be the way young creatures are in the springtime, simple and natural, not smeared and sinful and evil. From the way they acted together they liked each other. There was joy in them, not guilt.

Then, as I walked slowly back toward our house, across our land, I realized for the first time that the sick fever which had attacked me and had so suddenly been cured was something that all the years of marriage to Mabel had helped create. She had made sex a dark and shameful act, something done swiftly in darkness and never admitted or acknowledged in daylight. She had hidden her pregnancies as long as she could and in the last months had not gone out among friends or strangers. And so it had twisted me too, bolting an iron lid down on my human needs and instincts so that the pressures had warped something inside me.

A waste of something that could have been a good part of marriage, a good part of our lives. Now that we were old I was a sick and dangerous old man, and she was an old woman full of righteousness, with a venomous mouth and a permanent expression on her once-sweet face of suspicion and disapproval.

I was surprised and relieved when I found out the girl had had to leave earlier than she had planned. Even though I had stopped my mind from touching her body while I was awake, she was still a torment in my dreams, and the sooner she left, the sooner the dreams would return to old safe patterns.

I would say it was almost three months ago that a man named Paul Warcroft telephoned me long distance and asked if he and his wife could have the cabin for the month of May. He sounded like a pleasant young man over the phone. I asked him how he knew about the cabin, and he said a good friend of his had stayed in the cabin for a time and had liked it. I made sure he knew that it does not have all the extras that city people expect.

A lot of summer people had rented it during the two summers since Norrie Ames had stayed there. I told him he could have it if he would send me a deposit. I got the deposit in the mail the next day.

When they arrived in their shiny new car I recognized the bride right away. There was no mistaking their being on their honeymoon. She was very friendly. She did the introducing, all smiling and lively.

Of course, at that time I didn’t know why Mabel was so upset at finding out that Mrs. Paul Warcroft was Norrie Ames. I could hear Mabel all over the house, setting her feet down harder than usual, muttering to herself the way she does when she is working herself up to something. I think she came close to telling me a couple of times. If she had, maybe I could have stopped her. I don’t know. I know I would have tried.

In all fairness, I know that if she had had any way of knowing what would happen, she would never have said the first word to Paul Warcroft. She feels miserable about it. I guess she always will. I know I will. We seem to have even less to say to each other these days. The days are long and quiet. We’ll never rent the cabin again.

My name is Michael Lewis Henderson, Jr., and I will be nineteen years old next week. I can give myself a good case of the horrors at any moment by just imagining what could have happened to me if I hadn’t been able to prove in a dozen ways that I spent all of last month, the whole month of May, every single day of it, fifteen hundred miles away from that crazy apple farm. I was right there at New College in Sarasota, Florida.

I know that Norrie wasn’t trying to fake them out by swearing that I did it. She really believes it. And I guess it is better for her to believe that than to believe what really did happen.

She has last month all screwed up with the same month two years ago. That was the year I dropped out, in the spring, in April. I was sixteen, about to turn seventeen in June. And it was all two hundred years ago, give or take a decade. I know the sixteen-year-old Mike. He was somebody I knew well, but he wasn’t me. You can say, maybe, he was looking for me. Or, in another context, trying to avoid me.

My people had stuck me in a very, very special school near Chicago called the Haven Institute. They take you if you have a towering IQ, no motivation, a snotty attitude, and a lot of bread. They try to motivate you by pouring it on as fast as the inputs can take it. It is sort of a tutorial system, and they believe in a fantastic amount of outside reading. For a while there they turned me on, and I went charging ahead and had them all smiling at me and patting me. But then I began to wonder if the competitive system isn’t some kind of irrelevant hang up. Look at it this way. What kind of a world do you have if everybody functions up to their peak? You have people slavering and panting to climb to the top of something or other. But in a technological world, with more and more leisure for everybody, if you indoctrinate people with this strive-strive-strive psychosis, what are they going to do with it? Compete to see who uses leisure most constructively? Then it isn’t leisure any more. It is another kind of work. Right?

So my divorcee mother-lady sent me two bills in a letter from Hawaii, and I cashed her check and bought hiking shoes, rucksack, bedroll, camping gear, and took off. I headed for the back country, small roads, farms, and so on, with the idea that I would eventually wind up at Scarsdale, where I have a pretty good uncle who sometimes understands how things are.

Also I was going to make one target along the way, and that was to stop at Ithaca and look up a girl from home going to a small girls’ school there. I was fooling around with compass courses from time to time, and so I decided to head from Watkins Glen right straight across to Ithaca across country instead of following a little state road. I forget the number of the road.

It was a pretty warm day. I crossed the fence that put me onto Turner’s land, though I didn’t know it at that time. I came down into this shallow valley, and I found that deep cold pool under those old willow trees. I don’t think I even noticed the cabin at that time. If I did, I must have decided it had to be empty.

I needed a bath. The water turned out to be twice as cold as I thought water could ever get. I stretched out in the sun after I dried off. And then Norrie stepped out from behind the apple tree where she had been watching me all that time and said, “Hey! You! You want a peanut butter sandwich and some milk, boy?” She seemed to be half-scared and half-laughing. I couldn’t make her out at all. So I said why not, and she went to the cabin and I got dressed and went to the cabin and she told me to come in.

It was what she had decided to fix herself for lunch, so she just fixed more of them. She talked more and longer than any girl I had ever met. Not that I was much of an expert on girls at that time. She was an older woman. We figured it out later. Three years, six months, and nine days older. I know now that it was nervous talk. I didn’t know it at the time. She seemed perfectly at ease, just chattering away.

She rambled so much that it was hard to keep track and put the pieces together. But finally I got it worked out that she’d left school because of a nervous breakdown and she had been treated by a shrink and got well enough to come up and rent the cabin and bring her books and try to catch up enough so she could take her examinations in June.

She laughed a lot, a sharp little bark of a laugh, and it seemed to come in the wrong places. I told her all about me, after she had run out of chatter, where my home was, why and when my folks had split, the kind of school they put me in, and the reasons I’d left. Once we had gotten all the facts and statistics out of the way, we could start to talk about ideas. The things we believed or thought we believed, or wanted to believe, or just wanted to try out on the other person to see if they would believe them or knock them down. We talked all afternoon, there in the cabin and out under the trees, and while we took a walk. Then it started to get dark, and that turned it into another kind of ball game.

We had canned chili for supper, and we drank some supermarket red wine she’d bought. There was good rock on that little radio she had. We sat on the bunk bed in the dark and talked. I had to be careful to keep my voice from cracking. I was terrified, actually. I had touched girls, but I had never made it with one. And this was an older woman, and it had gotten to be sort of obvious that sooner or later we were going to go to bed together. I liked her looks and I liked her body, but I was too scared to feel any heat.

So finally I made the desperation try. I sort of lunged at her and grabbed her and tried to kiss her. She went rigid, and then started to fight, to really fight. She got me one under the eye that hurt. I let her go. She ran out into the night, crying.

It took me a long time to find her. She was all curled up into a ball under a tree, snuffling. It seems so long ago, and so quaint, like the kid story of the two children under the tree, and the birds covered them with leaves.

I sat by her, not touching her. I wanted to get my stuff out of the cabin and get out of there. She was some kind of a flip. But you get a sense of some kind of obligation, I guess. She came around finally and talked, but not like before. Not all the chattering. And not throwing ideas at each other like curve balls over the outside corner. Closer talk.

The thing that happened to her at school was rotten, being held practically a prisoner in some gummy pad by a jock type bombed on speed, humbly servicing the big bastard because of some weird idea on her part that she had to prove she was a woman. When the shrink had started to bring her out of it with medications, she had wanted to blame her breakdown on the bad scene at the jock’s pad, but he wouldn’t let her do that because it was too easy. He said she had to understand that the original emotional damage went way back. Her folks were both cold people in a physical sense, not hugging and touching and holding. So from the beginning she tried to get approval from them, as a sort of a substitute, a next best thing. And they kept setting goals for her just a little beyond her reach. So she had no sense of herself. She was just a thing, trying to perform in such a way she’d get what she’d never had — warmth and love. This is my way of putting together what she said, and maybe if I heard it all now, it would come out different in interpretation.

The shrink told her she was trying to get approval from everybody, including the jock, and the big sex party was another substitution for the physical affection she’d never had and always needed. She had told the shrink that sex with Mush had been like what happened to her at a playground at a private school when she was five years old. She had been on the teeter-totter with a friend, and a fat older kid got on the other end. Big sport. He’d hitch back and let his end bang down on the concrete, nearly tossing Norrie off her end, and then he’d slide forward so far she would go down and hit bottom. It scared her and it hurt her and it went on and on, and she kept smiling and laughing and chortling right along with the fat kid because she knew that if he knew she was scared, he might hop off entirely when she was way up in the air.

So no pleasure with Mush, and she equated that with no pleasure with anybody anywhere anytime. Just fear, pain, and keep-smiling. The doctor told her it might be that way for her forever. Or it might turn out to be good some day. It was all part of the original hang up. He knew she wanted to be a woman in every way, and he told her not to force it. He told her that if a person has one short leg or a missing hand or bad vision, then they do not try to become an Olympic runner, or a concert pianist, or a trapshooter. He said if she would think of herself as having a permanent disability that didn’t show on the outside, life could be rewarding for her. He told her that her people would never admit that any such disability was permanent, and for her not to let them sell her on the idea that she had just had a little unimportant breakdown.

We had gone back in out of the cold night and we lay there in the dark on our backs on the bunk bed, too far apart to touch, and we talked and talked and talked.

When she got around to confession, she told me that when she had heard the wallowing and sloshing in the pool she had thought an animal was there, and she had sneaked up and seen me, and then she had stayed to look at me naked. She explained that it wasn’t that she was getting any sex turn on out of looking at me. It was because I didn’t look scary to her. She had thought of a penis as being a kind of brutal, cruel, barbaric thing, all mixed up in her mind with the sacking of cities and rape of the Sabine women and blood sacrifices on old stone altars. But I had looked sort of innocent and harmless to her. I’d looked like something she could maybe manage without terror. I’d looked like part of nature. And my being younger made it easier for her too. So instead of sneaking away she’d forced herself to move out into the open and holler to me and offer me a peanut butter sandwich, which is one brand-new way to start a program of seduction, I guess.

But when it got to the moment of truth, she couldn’t cut it. The fright came back. And mixed in with the fright I got the idea that she hated the way she looked, hated her body, hated her build, felt as if she was a scrawny, ugly, sickening mess. She was ashamed of herself in a strange way that was hard for me to understand. I had had all the strokes I needed. A breast-fed kid; both my folks big, loud, warm people who’d grab you and hug you when you walked by. That’s why I felt lost when they got divorced, and reborn when they married each other again. So I’ve always felt at home inside my skin. I don’t think of myself in any kind of critical or insecure way, I guess. I am just here, and every part of me is my own and no different than any other part. I am not enchanted with myself, understand. But I look this way and there is no changing it, so why yearn to be somebody else?

But from such separate places, we were both loners, each in a different way. The one thing I would change — that I would have changed way back then, two years ago, but would just as soon leave alone now, would be to drop that damned genius IQ down twenty or thirty points, because what it did to me was let me see what damned idiots the people around me were. I could read them too easily. And I used to let them know about it, back then. So they hated me. Hate makes hate. That’s why I took off from school that time.

It was confession hour, so I told her how scared I had been and that I finally had to either make that grab at her or run out the door and across the hills and far away. I told her that I was a virgin, and I had certainly made a couple of tries to change that status, but I had been stopped short of scoring. I rambled on and finally asked her a question, and when she didn’t answer I knew she was asleep. I covered her over with a blanket and got another for myself and went to sleep too.

In the cold cruel light of morning, which everyone talks about, she wouldn’t look right at me. She couldn’t. She went skulking around with her head down, and when she talked she didn’t move her lips much. So finally after the eggs, I said we ought to try to settle it one way or another, for both our sakes. She told me that what I should do was take my stuff and go to Ithaca. I told her we were supposed to be bright according to all the measurements, and we should go at it the way you hit a case study assignment in school.

We spent most of the day shouting and snarling at each other. In the late afternoon I talked her into an experiment called body-reading. I stripped and stretched out on the bed. She couldn’t stand the idea of me watching her while she looked at me, so I put the pillow over my face. And she read me inch by inch, front, back and sides, toes to larynx, studying this strange specimen called young male. But it took her until the next day, in the late morning, to take her turn as the book and let me be the reader. It took her a long time to get used to it and to relax. I told her how lovely she was, how sweet and beautiful every part of her was. She kept contradicting me until finally I told her to shut up and enjoy.

Weird kids with weird hang ups in that cabin, full of the* scent of the apple blossoms. You could hear the creek bubbling along, hear the bird songs. Careful progression. Simultaneous reading, and then exploration by touch. Cause and effect. Do this, and watch what happens. Do that and watch what happens. Places to kiss and be kissed. At the end of the fourth day we were ready to try it. But in the dark, under the covers. She was constantly trembling, and she was too dry. I couldn’t get into her. We gave up. At dawn she woke me up and said maybe it would be the right time to try again. It was. I had not known what a fantastic sensation it would be, the first time of pressing and then suddenly busting through and then sliding sliding sliding, all the way to the deepness, looking down into her wide eyes in that early light, seeing tears on her lashes, and seeing a funny little self-satisfied smile. She pumped her hips twice and it finished me right then and there. I was so damned ashamed and annoyed. But then the next time, maybe fifteen minutes later, it went on and on and on, until she suddenly grunted and shuddered and held me very strongly, and then relaxed. She made a purring sound and we both laughed, and it was fine.

From then on it was half serious, half games. It was as if we had broken into the world’s biggest candy store, and nobody was ever going to stop us from gorging ourselves. We fooled around with crazy ways, crazy positions. I know now that she was a good lover. Back when I had no basis of comparison I thought they would all be like Norrie was in that cabin when we lost track of days and nights. But they aren’t like that. Not all of them. Not even a tenth of them, probably. She could make it about once out of every four times we made love, and that was, she said, all she could handle. She said the rest of the time it just felt good and if it left her on any kind of edge, she said, it faded back with no problems.

I suppose that sooner or later that old Turner bag had to catch us at it. Maybe we were lucky it wasn’t sooner. I’ll never forget seeing that face in the window, and I’ll never forget how much cool Norrie had, how we stopped and Norrie turned and stared back over her shoulder at that old woman, and how after that ugly face full of envy and hate was gone Norrie smiled and picked it up right where she left off, and pretty soon we forgot her and finished it. Then we packed and cleaned the place and left together in her car. We were going to stay together forever. That’s what we said. Maybe we should have. That’s another of the things I will never get to know.

I suppose that old woman could think that Norrie was some kind of rotten degenerate, teaching some young kid fancy ways to ball her. You see something out of the eyes of another person it can shake you up, it is so different from the way it seems to you. The old lady caught us screwing up a storm, but instead of being something rotten, it was all love and fun and jokes and pleasure. It felt good, damn it. It felt absolutely great. And she was being loved and held and hugged and stroked and cherished and all that. She was being used, sure. But wanted to be, as I wanted to be. There wasn’t any sense of dirt or shame. It was just finding out if this felt better than that, if this worked quicker than that, if this way slowed me and speeded her, and that way speeded me and held her there until I could catch up. The fact that Norrie was able to start it up again after the old lady left was some sort of tribute to some kind of progress she had made, I guess. She was her own person and she was doing as she pleased. But she told me later that, for one instant, there was a terrible feeling that some great darkness had opened up and she would tumble into it and never have to open her eyes or her mouth again, to react or relate to anybody.

But I think the old lady made us aware of sin. She was our snake and our apple. Because, after that, it wasn’t ever exactly the same.

We did a lot of singing, and we drove down roads we’d never seen before and would never see again. June, July, August. Nobody knew where we were. Let them sweat it out. Worked at weird jobs, and conned food, and spent our blood fixing up that rotten car about five thousand times. We finally split after we’d been with that group in Arizona three weeks. She thought they were fine, like I did at first. But the group there — fifteen guys, twenty-four women, and nine little kids — were too damned solemn. They had to be, in order to fake themselves out. They made pots and scratched up the ground and planted stuff, and went as close to naked as the weather allowed. They made up instant Indian legends, argued oriental philosophy, compared hallucinations, wove their own cloth, and constantly laid the knock on the military-industrial power complex and the materialistic culture and all that. They made up instant folk songs about it. If every one of them had laughed once each day, I could have adjusted. But they had to be solemn because they were supposed to be dedicated to this much more sincere way of life, which, after all, was just a handy way to excuse themselves for the opportunity they had set up of balling each other, catch as catch can. I found out that the ones who left were the ones who had decided to get married and not come back. And I found out about good old Eddie. An old guy, thirty maybe. Any time they really started to starve, good old Eddie would go to Phoenix and pull a couple hundred out of his trust fund and buy a jeep load of groceries and a couple of more books on mysticism and come back like a hero, sometimes with a new chick for the encampment.

Norrie and I were cooling a little. I guess maybe because we were doing some sharing. I said I’d had it, and she said she wanted to stay. I said good-bye around, and she walked down the rocky road with me. We smiled and shook hands, and then we kissed and we cried. She asked me to stay and I asked her to come with me. We went through the same thing again, and afterwards, when I was almost down to the highway, I looked back and she was still up there, sitting on a rock, knees under her chin, arms wrapped around her legs, and that big skirt dyed with berry juice spread out all around her. I made my contacts and I got into a pretty good place on short notice, and I will never again be in such great shape, I guess. I went through those courses like a madman.

I’m sorry about Norrie. It’s out of my line, but I’d guess that it is sort of like she locked a door and threw away the key. If you can ever make her understand what really happened, then you destroy her all the way. I think she’s just going to drift farther and farther out of touch, and there isn’t a thing anybody can do about it. If I was sure that I could have kept anything like this from happening by staying with her, I never would have left her. I would even live out there in solemn-town with good old Eddie keeping me from starving. I guess she wanted to honeymoon at the cabin as a kind of reassurance, maybe. Along with some defiance.

I don’t know.

It’s too bad, isn’t it?

My name is William D. Maas. I teach courses in criminology at the University of the State of New York and do a considerable amount of lecturing to police groups. I am sometimes called in on a consultant basis by police bodies to give an opinion on the progress of some specific investigation.

Lieutenant Sierma of the Criminal Investigation Division of the New York State Police asked me to give an opinion on the file regarding the murder of Paul Warcroft, age twenty-five. Death had occurred on May tenth at three o’clock, approximately, in the afternoon. I was given access to all the materials, and on June second I went to the Turner farm.

There I was able to compare the terrain and the distances involved with the widow’s statement, which I had read carefully in transcript form.

On the day of the death, the honeymoon couple had cooked small steaks for their lunch on an outdoor grill. She estimated that it had been about two o’clock when she was awakened momentarily from a nap by her husband leaving. She said he had on his swim trunks and was carrying a towel, and he said he was going to the pool. She went back to sleep and was awakened about forty minutes later by some sound outside. She said that it sounded like men’s voices raised in anger. But she could not hear a sound. She looked out the door but could not see her husband. She thought of calling him, then decided to get dressed and go look for him. She put on white shorts and a yellow top and sandals.

She said that when she was halfway to the pool, she saw a young man walking up the slope on the opposite side of the creek. She said that when he turned and looked toward her she recognized him at once as a boy she had known two years before. She was able to describe him in detail, the length of his hair, the style of his immature beard, his hiking boots, rucksack, bedroll, khaki trousers, knit sports shirt, blue baseball cap. She identified him as Michael Lewis Henderson, Jr., and she was able to recall his hometown in Illinois but not his address.

She said she called to him, but he made no response at all. She said he walked up the slope and over the ridge and on out of sight. He did not change stride, answer her call, or even look back toward her again.

As she approached the pool, she saw her husband face down on the bank, under the willows, his legs in the water. She ran to him, calling his name, and pulled him out with difficulty, as he was a man six feet one, weighing one hundred and eighty pounds, and sat and cradled his crushed head in her lap, and finally realized that he was dead. She then ran to the Turner farmhouse, and in their statements they both report her as being in such a condition of hysteria they could not understand what she was trying to tell them. They saw the blood that smeared the white shorts. Mr. Turner went back to the creek and found the body and hurried to the farm and reported it by phone.

After young Mrs. Warcroft had been given sedation, she was able to report what had happened. The description of Henderson was sent to all points, requesting he be picked up for questioning.

A careful search of the scene had produced little helpful information. The weapon used was a field stone formed of native granite, rounded by the action of the water in the creek over centuries. It had been picked up from the edge of the creek, leaving a bowl-shaped depression. It had evidently been hurled at the decedent, struck him a glancing blow, and had rolled to rest against the willow roots. There were bits of tissue and hair along with blood on a small portion of the stone which, in its curvature, was a rough match to the concave fracture of the skull of the decedent. The stone weighed 73.6 pounds.

Before I was asked to enter the case as a consultant, Henderson had been located in Sarasota, Florida, a resident student at a small liberal arts college. He was able to prove to cooperating law enforcement officers in Florida that on the afternoon of the tenth he had been at a local marine biological research laboratory assisting in a demonstration of the effects of water pollution on small marine organisms, a demonstration at which both city and county officials were in attendance.

In the transcribed statement sent north by the Florida officials, Henderson freely admitted to a close and intimate relationship with Elizabeth Norris Ames which had begun at the cabin at the Turner farm and had ended three months later in Arizona. He stated under oath that he had not seen her nor communicated with her during the intervening twenty-two months.

At the time I was brought in, it was Lieutenant Sierma’s theory that Mrs. Warcroft had seen a dangerous drifter who resembled Henderson just enough so that she believed it was he. It was in that place where she had first met Henderson, which made the incorrect identification more plausible. Sierma had gone to the spot where she had said she stood, and he had had one of his men walk up the hill at that same time of the afternoon. Sierma said that there was enough glare to make positive identification unlikely.

By the time I entered the case, Mrs. Warcroft was back in Philadelphia, under a doctor’s care.

After reading through all the statements again, I felt that Mike Henderson might be able to explain to me why she would wish to go to the same place for her honeymoon where she had apparently had a summer affair with him. As a criminologist and psychologist, I am always most interested in acts for which I can find little rational explanation.

I was at last able to reach the Henderson boy by telephone. I was pleased to find he was not the least bit guarded. He was very articulate, very concerned about Norrie, admitting a residual fondness for her. I asked him if he would mind writing up the history of Mike and Norrie and airmailing it to me. He said he would be glad to.

I was unprepared for both the length of it and the exceptional frankness of that personal document. There was, however, no flavor of lasciviousness about it. It was a story of two children trying to grow up, aware of their own handicaps. After reading it, I was able to think of Norrie as a person instead of the anonymous, tragic young widow.

Mike Henderson’s document gave me my suspect, of course. Mrs. Turner was elderly, but she was both spry and robust. And she had not mentioned in her statement that the same girl had stayed in the cabin two years before the tragedy. Again I had an act — this time of omission — which seemed senseless.

I went back to the Turner farm and I interviewed them informally and separately, the man first. I do not believe in all the trappings of formal interrogation. Conversation on an informal level is easier. And if something significant is discovered, they will always repeat it later for the record.

Ralph Turner had not been in the company of his wife when he had made his statement, and he had mentioned Mrs. Warcroft’s staying in the cabin two years before as Miss Ames.

He made a good impression in person, a stocky man with a weathered face, thick white hair, youthful blue eyes, a quiet voice and quiet manner. Yet when I asked him about the time the girl had first rented the cabin he became evasive, and he was not very deft at the game. He said he had been busy around the place and had seen little of her. I asked him if he was aware of the fact she had entertained a guest in the cabin for about ten days. He coughed and tugged at his collar and said that he had happened to see that she had a friend with her, a boy. No, he hadn’t mentioned it to his wife. It had probably slipped his mind. It didn’t seem important.

I then began to realize what was probably bothering him. Mike’s detailed story told about how, once her fear of exposing herself had been overcome, once she had become “used to her body,” Mike’s phrase, and could take pride in the pleasure capacities of her body, they would splash and play in the midday pool, sun themselves, and then have lunch, and then a long siesta of naps and love and talk. Probably Ralph Turner had seen them naked in the pool and had watched from some hiding place. It would weigh on his conscience to have stayed and watched. And perhaps he had not told his wife because he knew exactly what she would do. And there would be no chance to watch the young girl again. Mr. Turner was ashamed of himself.

So next I asked him if, after his wife had caught the young pair in flagrante and ordered the girl to leave, he had then let her know that he had seen the boy.

He stared at me, mouth sagging, and then leaned back in his chair and sighed. Then he nodded to himself. He asked me if the boy had told me about being seen by his wife, and confessed that this was the first he had heard of it. He said he knew that for some reason his wife was upset when the girl had come back as a bride, and now he knew why.

I tried to get him to discuss his wife in a critical way, but his sense of loyalty to her would not permit it. Next, of course, I talked to her before they had a chance to talk to each other.

Mabel Turner was a more difficult problem. She said that she wondered at the time if Mrs. Warcroft was the same girl who had stayed with them two years ago, a girl named Norrie Ames. Now, of course, she knew it was the same girl. But at the time people were asking questions she hadn’t thought to bring it up. She had thought that if it really was Miss Ames, then certainly the girl would have mentioned it.

I asked if she had stayed the full month, and Mrs. Turner said that the girl had left before her month was up.

Time for shock treatment. I let silence build, and then I shrugged and smiled and said, “She probably left because she didn’t like to have you prowling around the cabin, peering in the windows at her.”

She came to her feet, yelling, her face and neck puffed and red. It was a lie, a filthy lie. She had happened to look in the window once and she had seen what she had seen, and she had ordered that dirty little whore off the property at once. She would not and could not dirty her mouth by ever describing what she had seen that slut doing to some young hippie boy she had found and brought back to the cabin to use for her own sick hungers and evil pleasure. It was a long and loud performance, and when she ran down I asked her quite gently why, then, had she let such a vicious girl back onto the property.

She sat down and shook her head and explained that two years ago she had lied to her husband. She had told him the girl had left of her own free will. She had not wanted to upset him. How could she know the girl would be so callous and shameless as to come back to the very same place on her honeymoon? She recognized her immediately, of course, but what could she do about it?

I suggested that she could have quietly asked Norrie to enjoy the rest of her honeymoon elsewhere.

A flicker in her eyes. A slight smugness. She said she wouldn’t lower herself that much. She had decided to totally ignore the whole thing, to not even make any neighborly gesture. She had decided that the month would end and they would leave, and that would be the last of it.

I asked her if she had any theories about the murder. She said that, honeymoon or no honeymoon, one man was never enough for a slut like that girl. Maybe she wanted some boyfriend to move in with them and that nice husband didn’t take to the idea and so they killed him and made up some kind of a wild story. She told me that if I had seen what she had seen, I would know that girl was capable of anything — the more rotten, the better she’d like it.

I had the feeling she was holding something back. I didn’t know in which direction to look. At last, by a kind of psychic triangulation, I made a guess at it and tested my guess by saying, “You sound as if you thought Paul Warcroft was a nice young man.” She said he seemed very nice. It was a crime and a shame the way a sly, meek-acting little whore could snare such a fine young fellow. Then I said, “I would think then that it was your Christian duty to at least give young Warcroft some clue as to what he had gotten himself into. Why didn’t you?”

The smugness again. “I didn’t say I didn’t.”

“Then you did?”

“Sometimes you have to face up to it, Dr. Maas, and find the courage to tell somebody something they don’t want to hear.”

“What did you tell him?”

“When they drove out they were always together. Then he drove out alone. That was the day before the poor boy died. It was in the afternoon. I was doing some weeding in my flower beds, and like a fool I left the old wheelbarrer right in the driveway where he couldn’t get past it when he came back. So I went and apologized about it. And I asked him if he knew his wife had stayed in the cabin before. He said of course, and that was why she wanted to honeymoon there, because it was so quiet and beautiful and she had wonderful memories of the place because she had found it by accident when she needed it the most. I guess I must have snuffed some and looked strange and maybe I laughed, because he asked me what was the matter. And I said it certainly was strange how a wonderful memory for one person wasn’t exactly such a pretty memory for the next one. He wanted to know what I meant, and finally I said that being her husband he had a right to know. I said I’d had to throw her off the place the last time. I said she had a nasty habit of picking up boys and bringing them back to the cabin and doing filthy things to them. I said I warned her but she kept it up, and as my husband and I don’t hold with that kind of thing, I had to tell her to get out. I said we were decent people and we’d raised decent children and led a decent life, and even with the changing times and all, it seemed to me a kind of a nasty tricky thing to do to have your honeymoon right in the same bed where she’d been copulating those scruffy-looking hippie boys. He didn’t say word one. He just drove away like a bat, and a piece of gravel hit me in the leg and stung like fury. I did my duty, and it wasn’t an easy thing to do, believe you me. I always say the truth will out. Whatever you do in this life, you pay for.”

By then, of course, all the signposts were up. I made an appointment with Dr. Grenko and flew down and had a long talk with him. A very able man. Very human and very concerned. At first he did not think it could be possible. But the more he heard, the more uncertain he became.

A week later, on a warm Sunday afternoon, he met me at the Turner farm. He had left early in the morning and driven up with Norrie. She knew what was expected of her. She was to help us with the investigation of Paul’s death.

Grenko was very good with her. She had a childish earnestness about her. She was smaller than I had anticipated. One hundred pounds, probably. Almost pretty.

Grenko and I had worked out our little tableau, our clinical demonstration. It did not take long. I explained to her that we were trying to get a better line on Mike Henderson’s motives so that he could defend himself properly in a court of law. I stood on the shady bank beside the pool. Grenko took her ten feet away, beyond the replaced stone. He told her that he thought that Paul had probably said something to Mike which made Mike furious enough to kill Paul.

“Mike is very fond of you, Norrie,” I told her. “Maybe Paul insulted you somehow, said something bad about you in front of Mike.”

“But Paul wouldn’t have done that!”

“What if he said that...” I paused, continued. “You are a cheap slut. You wanted your honeymoon here because you were here two years ago, screwing some stupid kid, until Mrs. Turner threw you off the place.”

She was motionless, and her face had a slack remote look. Then she grunted and pounced. I heard her hands clap against the stone. She gave a cough of effort as she swung it up, and with eyes blazing, mouth agape, took two running steps and launched it at my face. I sidestepped it and it thudded onto the bank, rolled down, and splashed into the willow pool.

She was staring at the opposite slope, a hand shading her eyes. “Mike?” she said. She turned to Grenko. “That’s what he had to do, you know. When Paul said that, there wasn’t anything left for Mike to do but kill him. Everybody should be able to understand that. It’s not all that hard to understand? But I don’t know why he didn’t come back. I don’t know why he kept walking. I guess he was scared. Maybe he was ashamed, too. Because Paul and I loved each other very dearly. And we weren’t married long.”

What do you do with it? Where do you go when there isn’t any place to go? Those were the questions Grenko and I covered when I saw him again last week. We didn’t cover them. We went over them and around them and under them.

Who killed Paul? Norrie’s people killed him. Mush killed him. Mike killed him. Mabel Turner killed him. Hundred-pound girls can’t lift and throw rocks that size.

Grenko says the question is academic at best, because he is losing her. She is moving away from us all, into a world she can more easily endure. Contact is ever more tenuous and uncertain.

“And,” said Grenko with a kind of ironic despair, “she keeps getting prettier and prettier. Maybe one of these days she’ll be as pretty as her mother always wanted her to be.”